Most effective backup strategy?

[old.user4556]

Right,

After reading about Scouse's (I think it was Scouse) mishap with losing data and this chat about Seagate drives failing (even thought I don't have one), I think it's about time I employed a backup strategy and took a copy of all my explicit hardcore pornography, music and photographs which I would be heartbroken to lose.

What's the most cost efficient method of doing so? I don't know if I really want an external hard disk as they could be prone to failure or taking a knock (my missus is clumsy and breaks things).

Should I go for a DVD burner and go down that road? I can get a burner for £20 and burn off dual layer archives at 8.5 GB a pop.

What backup methods do you use and/or recommend?

 

[djpringle]

My first method was the burner one but as soon as I ended up with having to backup multiple machines (work laptop, my laptop and a desktop) it got to be a bit of a nightmare juggling discs. I also have had a number of DVD's failing over time for some reason which was an absolute pain but luckily nothing that important was lost.

Nowadays I have an external drive that's dedicated to backing up stuff, it's a fairly bullet proof Maxtor jobby and isn't particulary portable. I am contemplating going down the NAS route in the future though as drives seem to ridiculously cheap these days.

 

[Cadelin]

Right,

After reading about Scouse's (I think it was Scouse) mishap with losing data and this chat about Seagate drives failing (even thought I don't have one), I think it's about time I employed a backup strategy and took a copy of all my explicit hardcore pornography, music and photographs which I would be heartbroken to lose.

What's the most cost efficient method of doing so? I don't know if I really want an external hard disk as they could be prone to failure or taking a knock (my missus is clumsy and breaks things).

Should I go for a DVD burner and go down that road? I can get a burner for £20 and burn off dual layer archives at 8.5 GB a pop.

What backup methods do you use and/or recommend?

You need to start by figuring out:
1) The amount of data you are likely to need backing up (1 GB, 10 GB, 1TB?)
2) Where this data is stored (is it all on one computer? is it all picture/video files?)
3) How vital is it that this data? (Pictures of your sons first birthday that you would never want to lose? or some random porn that you could probably live without as long as you could download some more from the internet?)

I would recommend some kind of external harddrive or network attached storage device. Harddrives do fail but the chances of both of them failing at the same time are low. You can also get cases for harddrives so if you do drop them they should be fine! This does of course mean if there was a fire or something you could lose both drives. If you have data that you really can't lose there is online storage.

 

[Yaka]

ive got 5 2x500gb and 3x 1tb hdds, also use a heck of alot of dvds for family vids and pics x3 its anal but i lost pics of me gran before she passed 3 years ago which were very valuable to me and my parents and they are gone for good so i go extreme measures now

 

[soze]

I have a 2 fold backup first all my PC Data is on a seperate harddisk inside my machine (Docs Pics Videos) as i have lost this a few times when rebuilding. And that backs up to my nas with all my other media which is raid so would need to lose 2 drives to lose that. But i still use sync toy once a month to save all that to a usb drive that i leave at work so if my house burns down my porn is safe

 

[ford prefect]

I run a file server on my home network for storage and have an external drive plugged into that. The server backs up to the external drive once every other day. I figure the odds of both the drive in the server and the external drive dying at the same time are pretty slim.

Edit: I rarely use DVD's because I'm useless at writing down what is on them

 

[phlash]

As Cadelin says: first work out what you are backing up, the rate of change of data, sizes and reason for backup, usually this boils down to: personal data (irreplaceable), usually a few GB and can change quickly (eg: software development); downloads / installs / demos (replaceable) usually 100GB-1TB, changes less frequently; protecting against storage failure; protecting against idiot activity :-/

Once you know what you are trying to protect you can devise a strategy, in my case everything is held on my local NAS (actually a linux box) on a RAID array, with personal data backed up nightly to a remote site using rsync. Downloads tend to only float about on the target machine's Desktop, unless they were huge or hard to get hold of, in which case they go to the NAS, but no further. The nightly rsync gives me/us a few hours to recover from operator errors by copying back the deleted data for personal stuff.

 

[Chronictank]

I have a USB disk i send my important files to using a utility called Allway Sync (freebie, open source) (synchronises folders/drives etc.. so they are images of each other)

Every couple of months i clone that USB disk to a 1TB hard drive which stays offline for the most part except for the below.

For the main disks i use a free utility called clonezilla (also open source) to do a image of my OS drive so i always have a bootable system

 

[GReaper]

Need more info, although burning DVDs sounds like a reasonable strategy at the start - are you going to keep up with the regular backups?

I think most of the options have been covered here apart from one - online backups. It obviously depends on your Internet connection (if you've got evil caps don't bother), how much data you've got to backup and how often it changes. There are plenty of different providers with different solutions (upload via the web, their own software, etc), most of them are available at a reasonable price. Obvious advantage is you've got no hardware to worry about, but it'll be slow if you haven't got ADSL2+.

If your critical data is fairly small then a USB thumb drive might also be an option. The prices for 16GB of storage seems great at the moment, with 64GB at a reasonble price. Obviously it doesn't offer anywhere near the best price per GB as a real drive, but it won't use any power - you can just shove it in, do your backup and then take the thing out and store it safely.

 

[nath]

If your critical data is fairly small then a USB thumb drive might also be an option. The prices for 16GB of storage seems great at the moment, with 64GB at a reasonble price. Obviously it doesn't offer anywhere near the best price per GB as a real drive, but it won't use any power - you can just shove it in, do your backup and then take the thing out and store it safely.

Wouldn't advise that for important data - flash drives are notoriously unreliable and can simply stop working at a moments notice.

 

[ford prefect]

Wouldn't advise that for important data - flash drives are notoriously unreliable and can simply stop working at a moments notice.

Yeah, I get issued with those things at work quite regularly, and I have three dead ones in a drawer at the moment.

Having said that I do keep windows installation files and setup files for applications I use on one in my laptop bag as it's a lot more conveniant than carrying CD's or a bulky external drive around in my laptop bag.

Not good for a long term backup though.

 

[GReaper]

Is there any data for the failure time/rate of such flash devices? I've tried googling for it but not found any decent pages.

The warranties offered on some of the better brands of flash exceed the 3 years which most hard drives come with. Are the ones which you've experienced problems with cheaper models? Have you had any problems with the supposed high end ones?

Everything eventually fails, DVDs, hard drives - are flash drives really that bad?

 

[nath]

I don't use them much but I've been aware of ones that just fail. I guess it's possible they're better now but now my mindset is unless proven otherwise, they're not to be trusted. I do use them for the same stuff as you though Ford, very handy for that indeed.

 

[Yaka]

thing with flash storage is nothing is 100%, still sandisk, samsung etc have nice warranties and its better to pay premuim brand than no brand ones. things arnt helpped by the fact that there are plenty of fakes around which makes shopping for good deal a tad more worrying ebay, amazon market places are flooded with them.

 

[Zenith.UK]

For your precious "OMG I musn't lose this EVAR!!!" data... RAID1 mirror array is the starting point. If one drive catastrophically fails, you can always remove the duff one and slam in a clean replacement. The RAID controller should automatically synchronise the disks together until you're back to a fully mirrored copy again.

A major store that I support use RAID5 on their back office server meaning that they have 4 drives at any one time. 3 striped with distributed parity and a hot spare. If one of the 3 drives dies, the RAID controller automagically makes the hot spare live and starts rebuilding the data from the parity data on the other 2 drives. You can then remove the duff drive and slam in a replacement which becomes the new hot spare.

Another option has already been mentioned... use a drive image utility to make iterative backups of your OS drive. If your main OS drive dies, you just swap the drives around and blam, you're back in operation.

 

[Embattle]

Just got a Synology DS207 that is my backup solution.