Anything thats not backed up, your prepared to loose?

Associate
Joined
26 Mar 2005
Posts
25
That phrase seems to keep coming up in one form or another at the moment. I was reading a magazine the other day that had an entire spread on how important it is to backup, and then I was reading MicroMart, and again that had an article on backing up. Then you just need to download the latest 3D Mark 06' and almost every single Mirror Site has about a million banners advertising all the latest backup software...

Now in the past I have looked at a lot of different softwares in one form or another. But they all seem to have the same problem; they do little about compressing your stuff. I mean if like me you have a lot to backup it seems you'd need to DVD upon DVD, then whos to say it will all if the time comes to restoring your data. I remember in the Win 95 days I once backed up some vital clobber. In those days though it was only a 500Mb drive, and it wasnt even full. I backed up all I needed, and low and behold a year later the drive died. All enthusiastic I obtained the backup software, loaded it all up; only to find the first floppy disk had been rendered dead...and you couldnt proced with the restore.

Now I know we have moved on abit but.....

...it got me thinking. If I wanted to backup all my stuff now, how viable would it be to say buy a hard-drive, a fairly large one. Say 300Gbs, then spank that into my USB2 caddy, fill it to the brim with all my vital data, then remove it. And safely store it. Then if I need to restore I simply restore orf that?

It would seem its not the most popular option because its far from the cheapest, but it sure as hell would be the most reliable. And its really not that difficult either.

Any opinions?
 
Associate
Joined
15 Apr 2003
Posts
1,878
Location
Hertfordshire
Everbody is likley to a different back up strategy depending on individual circumstances.

For me, my data files are the most important. So these are backed up at 30 minute intervals to separate hard drives; and daily and weekly to DVD discs. Burning the weekly one as I type.

Next Windows and Applications. I have all the relevant software, but it's the time it takes to get your System back to where you want it. It would take me several hours to this, so I back up the OS and apps on a weekly basis to a separate hard drive.

Also, I use I have a separate hard drive as a mirror of the main one.
 
Soldato
Joined
13 Jan 2003
Posts
23,628
Offerman said:
Now I know we have moved on abit but.....

...it got me thinking. If I wanted to backup all my stuff now, how viable would it be to say buy a hard-drive, a fairly large one. Say 300Gbs, then spank that into my USB2 caddy, fill it to the brim with all my vital data, then remove it. And safely store it. Then if I need to restore I simply restore orf that?

It would seem its not the most popular option because its far from the cheapest, but it sure as hell would be the most reliable. And its really not that difficult either.

Any opinions?

Already do that :p
Ok, this is how I run:

Step 1: 36Gb machine that runs with day to day activities, switched on and off as needed. Has applications, games and temporary data. Email is backed up every-so-often to machine 2.

Step 2: 6x200Gb in RAID5. On 24/7. Houses all data.

Step 3: 60Gb USB drive. Periodic backup of most vital data from RAID5 array.

So as you can see- data is prioritised:
1. Stuff I can't loose.
2. Stuff I've paid for (ie applications like ZoneAlarm, tunes etc)
3. Stuff that's will be a pain to reaquire but is possible (patches, demos, unix downloads etc).

Only the first two are kept on the USB drive.
 
Back
Top Bottom