OK I know there really is only one answer to this question…
The real question is how to backup in a secure, robust and efficient manner? But I have to admit that I don’t have a great backup strategy at present. None to be exact. I do keep a copy of some data on my external HDD but it is really an ad hoc manual process. It wasn’t really that big an issue as there was nothing I couldn’t live without on my PC. Now however there are a few things that have changed my mind:
- I now have GBs of priceless photographs/video stored on my PC/External HDD as well as my music collection.
- I have recently replaced my aging pc with a 1TB RAID 0 disk array. This means my data is more vunerable with 2x the risk of disk failure. Also, HDDs are said to be more likely to fail early if defected or last for a long period of time. So I am on shaky ground at the moment.
- I have already had a couple of scares where it looked like my RAID had died and I thought I had lost everything. I don’t want to go through that again!
I have been thinking about getting a good backup strategy for a while. I will write an update soon detailing my options. In the mean time, I would love to hear some suggestions/requirements etc…
4 comments ↓
I’ve not used it but the rabid Mac types around here swear by Time Machine. One anecdote even had a bloke delete 11 GB of music to make room for a movie project he needed to work on. Once the job was done and dusted and archived, he Time Machined the 11GB back onto his machine.
Seems convincing.
I’ve implemented something along the lines of what JWZ mandates:
http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html
I’ve a pair of 500GB drives in a Linux box: the primary is shared out via Samba and the secondary is synced to this nightly. Protects against hardware-fault and no messing about with RAID
Unfortunately neither of those are an option for me and my Vista machine. I like the idea of regular incremental backups to a local drive, probably 1TB eSATA drive, along with fortnightly or monthly complete backups to media (RW blu-ray would be best) which can be stored off site (parent’s house). All of this is going to be pricey. And then the question is what software to use…
Check out JungleDisk ( http://www.jungledisk.com/ ) it backs up your data to S3. The first backup takes a loong time if you have a lot of data but subsequent backups are very fast.
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