I want a NEW backup medium. - Tech Support Forums

Rootstonian · January 3rd, 2006, 03:26 PM

I have about 5 computers at home. I currently back up just in case of hard drive crashes, viril infection etc.

I do all my backups with Drive Image to an external USB hard drive. However, what if the hard drive in the external box goes? I want a more long-term solution.

Burn the backups to DVD you say? Say I burn my images to 4 gig DVD's. 160 gig drive divided by 4 = 40 DVD's. I think not. And if I make my next backup (i.e. incremental or full), I have to toss those disks and burn more? Not going to happen.

I want tape backup. Used to be very popular in the day for personal computers, but it doesn't seem so now. Anyone have a good, pc-based tape system that won't cost me $500?

osprey4 · January 3rd, 2006, 03:38 PM

Rootstonian:

Remember, a backup is like life insurance. It's a bet. You're betting the hard drive company that their internal hard drive will die before somebody else's external hard drive does. So I see no long term risk backing up to an external hard drive. What are the chances that your backup drive will die at the exact same time one of your internal drives dies? Fairly slim, I would say.

Rootstonian · January 3rd, 2006, 03:45 PM

Yeah, but I'm paranoid

I have a few go out on me and it's not necessarily the manufacturer's fault.

We live pretty rural and are subject to brown-outs and black-outs. Last drive that got fried we had a brown-out, I heard the surge center beep, power come back on and before I got to the PC, 2 more quick brown-outs. Bye, bye HD.

Guess I should invest in a good UPS system...perhaps one that will power off pc after a period of time while on battery.

elroy · January 3rd, 2006, 05:12 PM

I back up to another hard drive. Like mentioned above what are the chances both drives would go at the exact same time? Not to high. In addition if the backup process isn't easy will you really get around to doing it very often? I use Acronis True Image. It takes about 1 minute to initiate a backup and will do my entire C partition in maybe 10 minutes. [about 12gb] It will do my D partition in about 35 minutes. [50gb] I usually start it when I go to bed and in the morning it's all done.
I also run a 900va Belkin UPS which comes with software [Bulldog software]. It not only has the ability to shut down in a certain amount of time but also when the battery gets to a certain level. This ups will power two 3200+ towers and 2 17" monitors using about 65-70% of it's capacity. Comes with a 3 year warranty which they will stand behind but you may have to absorb shipping costs to return a defective unit to California.

Ruahrc · January 3rd, 2006, 06:21 PM

I back up to HD's too. We even have data on some very old HD's (200MB capacity... that's how old!) and we have never experienced a failure. Like others have said, the chances that both HD's will fail simultaneously is very slim. Personally I trust HD's more than optical media, which might just be stereotypes from the earlier days of CDR though. I also think it is impractical to store large amounts of data on DVD as it will carry with it high cost and high time requirement (no automated solution because you gotta be there to swap DVD's in/out).

If you say your area is subject to power failures, I would be more concerned about getting a UPS rather than a better backup solution. Hard drives are a very mature technology. There are so many years of research and development and experience behind them now that I think HD technology is very reliable.

If you want to further protect yourself from being stuck w/o a backup, simply buy another external HD and create two copies of backup. Still paranoid? Make 3 backup copies. The more HD's you add, the less chance there is of them all failing simultaneously (and with MTBR's in the 100,000's of hours, we're talking the chances of getting struck by lightning when drinking a coke on a sunny day while jogging in swim trunks chances). Or, look into RAID solutions which can include data redundancy, further protecting you from disaster.

Do you leave your USB drive running all the time? With my backup HD's the only time they ever get power applied to them is when they're being refreshed with a new backup. After that they sit disconnected from both the computer and power until they are needed next. Power failure can't kill what isn't plugged in.

With greater safety/redundancy comes greater cost. I don't know what kind of data you have on your PC and how sensitive it is to loss (i.e. do you run your own business?). In my opinion HD technology is more reliable than tape backup, and tape backup is only used when vast amounts (in the multiple terabyte-range, at which HD backups become too costly) of storage are required. For smaller amounts of data HD's are faster, easier to handle, less expensive, and I would argue as reliable if not more so than tape backup.

Ruahrc

Rootstonian · January 4th, 2006, 08:36 AM

Nice replies guys; opened my eyes to my apparent "over" paranoia! LOL

I only have the USB drive powered-on during backups; the rest of the time it is unplugged and safely tucked away.

Don't run my own business, but we lost about 4 years of tax files and about 300 pictures on one of the drives.

I think I'll look at just what I have on the backups and burn the CRUICAL stuff to optical, for example: pictures, tax files, Word documents etc. Most of the drive space is OS and programs anyways and I have original disks to reinstall if necessary!

And a UPS sounds like it'll be on the shopping list shortly (as soon as we pay off all our Christmas, tuition, dental bills! LOL).

osprey4 · January 4th, 2006, 09:22 AM

I use an external drive to image my hard drive (infrequently), but for routine back-ups, I use DVD-RW. I keep all my important files, docs, tax files, pix, etc. in one folder and do a weekly backup of just that one folder (about 2-3 GB).

sechs · January 4th, 2006, 11:06 PM

Keep in mind that user error is far more likely to lead to the loss of data than hardware failure.

Critical data should be backed-up to optical often (at least as often as you backup the entire drive, if not moreso).

I'd suggest that you keep with your regular back-ups to the external drive, but also burn one of those to optical disk several times a year. Not only is this insurance against the unlikely, it's a prudent archival method.

If you decide to spend some additional money, get an external tape drive.

jokostel · January 4th, 2006, 11:37 PM

NAS box

shizzzon · January 4th, 2006, 11:45 PM

This is what i do, take it as you will-

I backup 3 desktops, i backup the master drive on each so that's 3 images.

1 PC will backup the network while i am asleep. It will backup the network once every 2 weeks and I will then burn onto DVD+RWs those backups once every 4 weeks. The backup drive also has a backup as well.

So to break it down-
Got 1 main hard drive backing up 3 Master images, approx 60 gb total. those 3 images are also copied to it's slave drive. For every 2 backups on these drives, a set of DVD+RWs are used to back those up as well.

That's a total of 3 backups, if one fails, the other 2 will make sure the 3rd comes bck failry quick. Also have 3 data recovery tools in case ALL 3 fail-
Easy Data Recovery by I think OnTrack
GetDataBack for NTFS
Winternals Admin Pak

I go through HDDs like a race to see which one dies first, hehe