Protect that data!

[FlyingPete]

I have almost 20GB of 'digital assets' (mainly photos) now. As my day job is as a storage engineer I know all to well that hard disks can fail, and I would be devastated if I lost them all so I keep them on a pair of hardware mirrored ATA hard disks that are not my main work machine.

I used to save them to CD-ROM, but this is time consuming and I had one too many CD failures (luckily I burn two copies of everything, and leave one at work).

If my house burns down, or if one of the local volcano erupts (apparently due in the next few hundred years, great photo op though!) I will loose all my data, as I don't have an offsite anymore, I am thinking of a removable drive.

How does everyone else protect their data? I have heard too many horror stories about people keeping all their data on a single disk and loosing it all to not take this stuff seriously. I hope I am not being too paranoid!

[CoolToolGuy]

I have Backup My PC, which is Veritas Backup Exec for desktops. I currently backup to CD-RW, but that gets old, so I have a DVD-RW drive waiting in the wings. My intent is to let BUMP do incremental backups in the middle of the night - much easier with the 4.7 GB of the DVD.

I grew up in my day job as a DASD guy, so this is near and dear to my heart.

Have Fun
Rick 8)

[Scottes]

I have 2 80-gig USB drives and I do simple copies swapping them back and forth. I've been in computers for 16 years and (amazingly) I have little important data on it. In fact, the most important data on my system is a list of phone numbers of friends and family.

I guess I've seen too many problems with computers, so nothing very important goes on them.

[JZaun]

Having spent 31 years in the business machine industry I know computers will fail. I have also had 3 major crashes at home. One due to a worm, one bad hard drive and one unknown but it wiped the disk. May have been a virus but didn't detect it. I do weekly back up's of all documents and pictures I keep on the computer. I altinate 3 CD's for each category. Documents, Pictures, . should the computer crash I have the past 3 weeks on hand for back up. Hopefully all 3 CD's will not be bad so worst cast should be 1 week lost. If I add a lot of any kind of data, Pic's documents, I do the weekly back up then and again on my normal Fri night.

I hate rebuilding files!!

JZaun

[CyberDyneSystems]

With over 80 Gigs of data that I hold important,. I use a combination of redundant Hard Drives for instant on line back ups and archive,. and I burn CD and DVD as well...

The System consista of three 160 GB hard drives for starters,. the first two are Mirrored in Hardware RAID1 (both disks have the same data)

The third disk is on a seperate IDE channel and is for back up only,. I use a program called "Mirrir folder" which is a combination real time software RAID1 and back up solution in one.

I don't use it's real time RAID though,. (not since I git the twin drives in Hardware) but I do use it to make a third copy of all the important stuff,. and it does it every 4 daya... this way if I make a blunder on the two Main disks,. I have four days to realize it befor ethe blunder is repeated on the third drive.

Then I have an exteranl Firewire Hard drive tray with another 80 gig drive (soon I'll need a larger one) to make a 4th copy of the important stuff.. in this case the drive is turned off 95% of the time and I occcasionally turn it on to do a backup (again using mirror folder)

I do all this because it is automated and takes no effort and I am lazy about burning disks.

When I do get my act together I will burn CD's or DVDs.

[Jesper]

About once a month or so I put my photos on DVD. Does anybody know how long DVDs will hold (especially DVD+RW, which I use)? I've read a disturbing article about CD-Rs, about the data becoming unreadable after a few years.

[PeterS45]

I copy all my pictures on an external HD and keep that with all other important stuff at the bank. Besides that I keep a copy on CD and have my parents watch over that.

[where1]

I have 2 hard drives on my computer. Every day at 4am while I am asleep, the computer backs up anything new in C:\My Documents to the other hard drive. I also make CD-Rs. When I have enough CDs to fill a DVD, I make one of those. I also copy my CFs to my X-Drive, where the data stays until I make a DVD back up.
I should make another DVD and keep it off premise, I do OP backups with everything at work. I think I will, I know how heartbroke I was when my basement flooded, and I lost several years of pics, negatives and slides.

[FlyingPete]

Well I feel better about my Mirrored drives and offsite now, I thought I might have been getting a bit extreme, that might happen when I deploy my off planet orbital backup platform.

Seriously though, the guy on the radio the other morning was saying how he had been completely put off digital cameras after his hard disk crashed and they lost all the photos of the first 2 years of their child. Bummer. This is exactly why I don't believe that this technology is quite there for mainstream.

[Jesper]

Here is the article I was referring to: http://www.informationweek.com/story...cleID=15800263

It states that CD-Rs may become unreadable after only 2 years, because the materials that the disc is made of age.

[pradeep1]

80 GB of data heh?

I store on current machine. One copy on dedicated backup HDD. One copy on 18 DVD-Rs by Ritek. One copy on 18 DVD-Rs by Prodisc.

One copy on dedicated backup HDD at parent's house, which I updated once a month or so.

Maybe one of these days, we'll be able to get 100GB online storage for a reasonable price, and I'd toss one up there for safe keeping as well.

Once everything is stored and I have a baseline backup. I then incrementally backup as needed. The two HDDs will have all the files together. The DVD-Rs will have the recent files just added on. After I get 4.3 GB, I finalize that to one set of DVD-Rs and store that away.

Once the next technology comes by, I'll backup everything to those 100GB disks and still keep all these DVD-Rs until the next technology comes up. Then we'll have 100 Terabytes disks, and I can toss the DVD-Rs.

Don't you love technology.

[JZaun]

Every time I read these post I spend money

I thought I had plenty of back up but after reading what others were doing I went out and got a second 80 gb hard drive to back up photo's. I will back up everytime I update or add to current files and back up to CD weekly Maybe that will be enough!

JZaun

[FlyingPete]

You could get really clever here, if you knew someone else who had a large quantity of low change data (such as photos) and you both had DSL connections, you could replicate to each other via a VPN tunnel, perhaps run a script every night to replicate changes.