Are you backed up?

Just wondering if and how Hexites backup thier data. Now being 'probably' the greatest techy forum on the net, there's going to be a lot of peeps doing it properly either with nas/tape/off-site storage/fire safe etc. But there's going to be a good proportion that back up their data irregularly, and indeed, if at all.

Personally I have 2 1tb nas boxes running weekly backups alternately, plus another just for music, personal stuff like docs & photo's & digital downloads. Plus all that is backed up off-site via online storage incrementally every week.

So, are you properly backed up? How? & if not, why not?

No backup. Too lazy! Though I did learn a lesson about a month ago when I lost everything. (As a webdesigner, I lost alot of my portfolio :() The only thing that is priceless on the computer to me, is all my photos of friends and family. But I keep those on a 2gb SD card, just incase of a HD fail.

I use DVDs for back up but now that HDDs are cheap I can just buy another and stick it in an external enclosure and only use it to make a ghost image of my main HDD.

I don't feel (at he moment but someone could prove me wrong) that the data I have at the moment is super duper critical. It's more social/fun stuff that I would be upset at losing but wouldn't be the end of the world.

I would at some point like to have some sort of NAS box or alternate method of backing up but there are so many methods and they could all still fail...

i have a copy of important stuff spread across logical and physical drives :)

(i.e. Music, is on drive1 on logicals c and e, and it is also on drive2 logical z, and then there is an external copy on drive3 (removable 500GB) and another copy on drive4 (removable 160GB))

the logic being: if my PSU blows and takes everything out, i have 2 external backups
if one drive dies, i have an internal backup
and if a logical drive is corrupted then i have a quickly copyable on the same drive (yeah, the two logical's make no sense...)

i have been considering an external enclosure for an old 80GB, for another backup.. :D

so i have multiple copys on multiple drives internal and external and in different areas of the house :)


it's just cheaper and more efficient to backup on drives than DVD-DL as i would need 100+ for a decent backup

Anyone got any experience of using Drobo's?

http://www.k-forcecomponents.co.uk/i...oduct_id=30036

I'm waiting for it to come back in stock but would like to hear if anyone has any suggestions to similar products.

Photos and documents I have in two locations - PC and NAS

But no "backup" as such. Everything els eon the NAS boxes isn't backed up as I don't have the storage space, if i loose it I can alsoways re-create it. Although I am going to get another external drive to backup my music to, that would take far too long to rip again.

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Originally Posted by yid0

Anyone got any experience of using Drobo's?

http://www.k-forcecomponents.co.uk/i...oduct_id=30036

I'm waiting for it to come back in stock but would like to hear if anyone has any suggestions to similar products.

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Buffalo do them, also check out Thecus @ Scan. We have their support forum on site here.

I've used Micro$oft's Skydrive for a fair bit of stuff too. 5gb free online storage, sharing facilities. Not bad for nowt.

My most precious stuff tho is probably my photo's, 8 odd years of the kids lifes in jpeg & video :) Absolutely priceless.

What really did it for me was dragging out some reely old back up cd's which were unreadable. Made me realise the fragility of optical media as a long-term solution.

I use a Windows Home Server that creates incremental images of all 5 or so pcs in the house each day. I also have duplicated folders for photos and more important stuff (so it keeps copies on seperate drives), finally I have an external drive to backup the important stuff from the server onto.

I used to back things up onto DVD's but it just too onerous for large amounts of data these days and I've noticed some of my older disks have become unreadable. I'm happy with my current setup as it requires very little maintenance, other than adding more storage once in a while.

I like to archive important stuff to DVD-R, using a RAID5 array for resilience in day-to-day operation.

If you do archive to DVD, I would recommend using QuickPar, SmartPar or another alternative to ensure that any errors that appear on the disks over time do not end up destroying your data.

Even if you use a 100% overhead, its worth it when you consider the costs of DVD-Rs and the speed at which you can write them these days.

It's all stuff you can't afford to lose, and not something that seems important 'at the time'.
Like checking whether your household contents insurance covers digital purchases & downloads...

I don't bother, don't have anything worth backing up. My computer has music and that is about it which I can easily replace.

I backup all my stuff to a 1tb external HDD every week or 2, had considered some more realtime resilience such as RAID5, but not really worth it for me.

my home server has 7tb space and 5tb worth of data already used. im about 90% backed up

Aint had time to backup new stuff etc due to uni!

I take a weekly image of my gaming rig, the missus' rig and the 2 laptops. All those get dumped on a NAS and rotated on a 4 weekly basis.

Important documents and photos (stuff that I've deemed too important to risk) is backed up to the DAS for an onsite backup using a script which pulls the data together, and also to Amazon S3 for offsites - this job is agent based on one of the virtual Server 2003 boxes and runs continuously.

That's it for me.

nah not really. Not got much id be botherd about other than my music and boxing vids and my music is on CD so would just take time to get that back on my 'puter. Maybe i should burn the boxing tho now i think about it...

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Originally Posted by 0iD

I've used Micro$oft's Skydrive for a fair bit of stuff too. 5gb free online storage, sharing facilities. Not bad for nowt.

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You can also use LiveMesh as a backup, just create it to not sync except online :)

I use a few 500 Gb HDD's in a Raid 1 array to store all my media files now I've built my new system and got everything upgraded.

I did use a RAID 5 array but to be honest this was overkill so I moved all the data from the RAID 5 to 2 x RAID 1 arrays using 4 x WD5000AAKS drives for storage now.

I am also in the process of build a NAS server with lots of drives installed and freenas as the operating system but finding the time to complete this is hard at the moment.

Time machine on a different server over the other end of the network. :)

Random post only linked by the phrase "Back it up"...

Not a rick roll but be funny if it was

Daily overnight backup of important stuff (firefox profile, jobs/CV data, email) to both a USB drive and an rsync.net account.

Monthly(ish) cloning of both primary HDD (300GB) and random-crap HDD (1TB) to same-sized external SATA and USB HDDs.

It does work fine. My boot drive broke a few months ago and the cloned one worked fine. Swapped HDDs over, then restored the overnight stuff. Then cloned the new HDD to another HDD which I also have spare... (I have another two of the same 300GB Seagate, but only one other 1TB drive)

Cloning: either Acronis TrueImage or Casper.
rsync: whatever rsync.net recommends Windows users use
Syncing to the USB drive: SyncBackSE

All my photos are in my Gmail account (used to use gmail drive but that's borked - now I just email them to myself) and on Picassa.

My desktop drives are mirrored monthly onto my server as is my laptop.

EDIT: I tried so hard, but I'm sorry, I can't let it slide.

No, I'm not backed up, a strong coffee shifted it this morning.

There, I feel better now :)

I use a playtime 3.5 hdd divx player bought it awhile back at bowlers in manchester its a cracking little thing only cost me £80 link below to give you an idea of what it does.

http://www.ipcmax.com/product_info.p...62&language=en

Tend to do a major backup of documents every few months onto DVD, stuff like MP3 and PDF files I've purchased. Other than that, only other stuff important to me I tend to upload to GoogleDocs as a form of backup.

As I run my own web development company, I back up every day to an external USB drive and a dedicated PC upstairs. The last thing I need to do is lose an entire days worth of coding, that would really cheese me off.

Also just bought a couple of external 1Tb drives to do weekly backups of everything else (music, photos etc) and store drive images as well. You can NEVER have too much space for backups IMO.

Waiting for the faster blu-ray drives to arrive, then I'll start archiving the important stuff to that.

I'm thinking of investing in a drobo though, but you're looking at ~£600 all in to get any meaningful capacity..

Q: Are you backed up?

A: Yup!! Got a 500 GB external hard drive think its one of the new western digital ones. Anyway, got all my music and photos on it plus my thesis work. Other than that the only other back I have are two 2gb usb stick for my thesis work.

DVD's, mostly.

Memory sticks for daily backup of work stuff.

External HDD for regular cloning of Media machine contents which atm is around 1500 audio albums and 400 films in DivX format.

I have a stack of CD's and DVD's going back to whenever it was CDRW's appeared. One day I intend to go through them all and sort out the wheat from the chaff but it seems a daunting task.

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Originally Posted by Stoo

Waiting for the faster blu-ray drives to arrive, then I'll start archiving the important stuff to that.

I'm thinking of investing in a drobo though, but you're looking at ~£600 all in to get any meaningful capacity..

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Is there any info yet on the longevity of Blu-Ray disks? Will they deteriorate like CD's do eventualy. Depending on storage of course. Even in a fire safe some CD's I wrote 4 or 5 years ago are unreadable now.

i do need to get at least a 1gb NAS, trying to justify a wireless version so i can use the laptop downstairs as well :)

Does the NAS actually need to be wireless though? If you have a wireless router, just hard wire it into that, then everything on your network can get at it.

very good point

I do backup to my 2nd internal hard drive, but that is not good enough? Any advice as to how to backup properly would be great.

put the second drive in a removable case or external enclosure, then unplug it and store it somewhere safe. Somewhere not in your house is good, that gets round the flood/fire problem :)

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Originally Posted by 0iD

Is there any info yet on the longevity of Blu-Ray disks? Will they deteriorate like CD's do eventualy. Depending on storage of course. Even in a fire safe some CD's I wrote 4 or 5 years ago are unreadable now.

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Blu-Ray are supposed to have an archival life of 50 years according to TDK, but Delkin have come up with special "Long-Life" archival discs with a 200 year archival life:

http://www.delkin.com/products/archi...ay-delkin.html

:)

http://www.spaphoto.co.uk/store/acat...-ray_BD-R.html

Not cheap though..

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Originally Posted by 0iD

I've used Micro$oft's Skydrive for a fair bit of stuff too. 5gb free online storage, sharing facilities. Not bad for nowt.

My most precious stuff tho is probably my photo's, 8 odd years of the kids lifes in jpeg & video :) Absolutely priceless.

What really did it for me was dragging out some reely old back up cd's which were unreadable. Made me realise the fragility of optical media as a long-term solution.

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just sticking my wedding pics on skydrive at the mo thanks :)

Is Skydrive secure/private

yes m8, you have private or public folders

I've got 2 2tb Terastations..



But no, I'm not backed up...
Spose I probably should do really eh...

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Originally Posted by comatose

I use a Windows Home Server that creates incremental images of all 5 or so pcs in the house each day.

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Didn't know it could do that. I've heard a lot of negatives about WHS, but that's a major plus.

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Originally Posted by Stoo

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Originally Posted by 0iD

Is there any info yet on the longevity of Blu-Ray disks?

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Blu-Ray are supposed to have an archival life of 50 years according to TDK, but Delkin have come up with special "Long-Life" archival discs with a 200 year archival life

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Aren't the layers in BR media meant to be a lot "thinner" (or was that HD-DVD)? Therefore, wouldn't that make them more "fragile"?

I've just ordered two WD 1tb GP HDDs which I want to make a raid 1 (i.e. "backup") with. Trying to work out how to do it on a PC that already has a hard drive (with an operating system). About half way though the 100 or so Hexus threads (inc this one) I opened to try and get advice. Any links?

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Originally Posted by baius

I've just ordered two WD 1tb GP HDDs which I want to make a raid 1 (i.e. "backup") with.

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Nuh uh. RAID1 is a mirror, not a backup.

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Trying to work out how to do it on a PC that already has a hard drive (with an operating system). About half way though the 100 or so Hexus threads (inc this one) I opened to try and get advice. Any links?

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Take an image of the drive that you want to add to the array, verify the image then shutdown. Install the second disk and create the RAID array, then restore that image to the RAID array.

My server is mirrored. I have a backup to a NAS box too, which needs to be done again as I haven't done it in a while!

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Originally Posted by baius

Aren't the layers in BR media meant to be a lot "thinner" (or was that HD-DVD)? Therefore, wouldn't that make them more "fragile"?

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I don't know how thick each layer is, but I presume you are refeing to Bluray having it's data a lot closer to the surface of the disk than HD-DVD, DVD or CD. This used to be a problem before TDK came up with a scratch resistant surface coating called Durabis. This has the advantage of letting the Bluray Disk Association squeeze more layers into the format. One of the partners, I can't remember exactly who (TDK i think), has managed to develop a ten layer Bluray disk in their labs.

Nothing too complex, I just have a seperate drive, which only houses ghost images of my important stuff and the windows drive. My documents, and Music gets a backup and the C drive. Thats enough in my view, I have some super duper critical data in my backup drive, that is encrypted and then stored on a DVD...so im pretty satisfied.

i ended up buying a 2nd hand thecus n5200 to do the job :)

I use the $4.95 a month version of this...

http://mozy.com/home

... and love it. Being able to access my backed up photos and music via the web's nice and handy :)

just a second 500gb hdd in my pc, and a couple of dvds of important stuff

Main rig and netbook are backed up automatically every morning to the WHS box. Vital stuff gets mirrored onto multiple devices, all local though. The only thing preventing me from using online storage is my upload bandwidth - it'd take ages to transfer the photos etc.

Edit: Looks like SkyDrive's increasing to 25GB of free storage soon. It'd take a week on my connection to fill that :D

two external hard drives. i think ill loook more into online backups when my new pc arrives. anybody know any other good free sites apart from skydrive?

I would think so. I have two main 1TB spinpoint drives, let's call them A and B. Every 12 hours, A is backed up to B via a piece of software called Chronosync (Mac only). I also have 2x 1TB WD MyBook Studio II drives (basically 2x 500GB drives as RAID0 inside each) - and it gets mirrored onto these.

Of course, the very large data is mostly anime and movies - the core data like important files etc gets offloaded to DVD-R or DL DVD+R regularly :)

(it's actually a bit more complicated than this, as the core data also resides on the laptop - Chronosync also ensures that altered files are synced properly).

I have one desktop games machine and two laptops. I also work on client sites for between 6 months to 2 years at a time, so I have to worry about the work PCs too. I keep a copy everything of importance on one or other of the laptops and use the games machine as my main storage. I have a 4GB memory stick which is a sort of third backup, but I am aware that I could lose it and act accordingly.

I have my core data in at least 3 places and also I use an online storage facility.

The really crucial stuff I backup to DVD as and when necessary. I lost my main PC this summer, and apart from having to buy a new copy of Windows, I actually lost nothing of value, except my home Outlook data.

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Originally Posted by Splash

Nuh uh. RAID1 is a mirror, not a backup.

Take an image of the drive that you want to add to the array, verify the image then shutdown. Install the second disk and create the RAID array, then restore that image to the RAID array.

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You're right. Sorry. Did put it in "quotes", though, as I couldn't think of a better word at the time. (Hexus said I submitted the post at 1:49am, so I was probably tired, too.)

Thank you for proposing a solution, but from what I can gather, I need a 3rd device to backup to whilst I create the raid. Is that correct?

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Originally Posted by Funkstar

I don't know how thick each layer is, but I presume you are refeing to Bluray having it's data a lot closer to the surface of the disk than HD-DVD, DVD or CD.

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That's mistake number two, then. Teach me to chat - or question - out my backside.

Most of my /home folder gets backed up daily to my NAS box. Some stuff that's really big is excluded and I manually refresh copies of that elsewhere as I feel like it.

I also run a RAID 5 array because I don't like downtime from disk failures.