What's Your Backup Regime?
polycounter lvl 12
My brother recently shared this article with me and now I'm paranoid my hard drive is about to break at any moment. As it rightfully should mind, as my current system for backing up stuff is half-arsed at best.
At the moment I just backup all my important stuff to a 1TB Toshiba hard drive, and then the really important stuff I distribute across 2 older hard drives. I have to admit the latter step is done to rarely. The problem is the older drives are just to small and I fear are liable to break. One hard drive I removed from an old laptop, which I trust even less.
I've considered backing up old projects that I just need for safe keeping to DVD's. But when I have 70GBs worth of old projects (I have lots of rendered frames), burning them to 8GB discs just doesn't sound fun.
My next thought was to invest in a Bluray player that could burn BD as well. It would cost as much as investing 2 decent sized hard drives and might even be cheaper in the long run. That way I could burn old files to 25GB, or 50 GB disc's and then store them off sight. Short term backups can be done to my current hard drives. The downside to that is I can imagine burning 50GB of data disc is going to take a long time.
My 3rd option is just to simply invest in 1 (or 2 and replace my old drives) 500GB-1TB hard drive, use my current 1TB for backing up all data regularly. Use the new hard drive for backing up essential files like pictures, projects, both old and new. Again, I would do this regularly. Then, finally my 2 old drives for keeping my older important files off site in case of fire, flooding, plague of locust etc.
Which brings me onto my question, what's your backup regime?
I have no idea which option to trust! So, anyone who can share any experience on the subject would be greatly appreciated. particularly DVDs, as I've heard they're not liable to last. Not sure if that's true though. Then again, to me, hard drives have moving parts and I'm unsure how they respond to sitting dormant.
So any help is appreciated, cheers!
At the moment I just backup all my important stuff to a 1TB Toshiba hard drive, and then the really important stuff I distribute across 2 older hard drives. I have to admit the latter step is done to rarely. The problem is the older drives are just to small and I fear are liable to break. One hard drive I removed from an old laptop, which I trust even less.
I've considered backing up old projects that I just need for safe keeping to DVD's. But when I have 70GBs worth of old projects (I have lots of rendered frames), burning them to 8GB discs just doesn't sound fun.
My next thought was to invest in a Bluray player that could burn BD as well. It would cost as much as investing 2 decent sized hard drives and might even be cheaper in the long run. That way I could burn old files to 25GB, or 50 GB disc's and then store them off sight. Short term backups can be done to my current hard drives. The downside to that is I can imagine burning 50GB of data disc is going to take a long time.
My 3rd option is just to simply invest in 1 (or 2 and replace my old drives) 500GB-1TB hard drive, use my current 1TB for backing up all data regularly. Use the new hard drive for backing up essential files like pictures, projects, both old and new. Again, I would do this regularly. Then, finally my 2 old drives for keeping my older important files off site in case of fire, flooding, plague of locust etc.
Which brings me onto my question, what's your backup regime?
I have no idea which option to trust! So, anyone who can share any experience on the subject would be greatly appreciated. particularly DVDs, as I've heard they're not liable to last. Not sure if that's true though. Then again, to me, hard drives have moving parts and I'm unsure how they respond to sitting dormant.
So any help is appreciated, cheers!
Replies
I'll be moving in December and will have 30 Mbit up and down, so that means I can finally use JungleDisk coupled with RackSpace, to backup affordably offsite. For now I use SyncBack to schedule a backup of my project folders to two separate external drives, and I always activate it when I leave my desk to take a break.
Still a bad solution in case of theft or a fire, but it should at least help if one of the drives breaks down..
EDIT: I didn't read your entire post. 70 GB of old projects would probably be a bummer to burn to 7GB dvds, but personally I'd still go with the DVDs. You don't have to do it all in one day.
@ East - SyncBack is one that I have came across before, so I think I'll use that one. Backing up stuff over the internet is something I'm still unsure of, although maybe I'm just being overly paranoid lol dropbox for short term backups couldn't hurt I guess .
Backing up whilst I take a break is not a bad idea. I used to have it set to a scheduled time (using windows 7 built in function), but there was never a time when it was convenient. As jeffro mentioned, Thanks for the tips!
@ Faringo - Might give burning DVDs a go. At least for my old university files which hold most value. Guess it could save my ass in the long run!
@ Kevin - Hardy har har har :poly105::poly124:
If only solid state drives were cheaper...
Also, perhaps more importantly, I read RAIDs were tied to certain motherboards. If you chose a raid and then, later on, want to upgrade your motherboard/computer, you'll have to make sure you get one that is compliant with that RAID. Plus, I foresee upgrading a RAID system once it becomes out of date more expensive than just buying another hard drive or a set of discs (don't know how likely that is).
Unless I'm getting the wrong end of the stick. I got most of my info here.
I read up a bit about RAID when I was looking into backup solutions. Vig knows all about them and could probably give you plenty of info, but in all honesty I decided it was far more technical than my knowledge would permit. It seemed like I'd end up causing more trouble than it's worth if I'd gone with a RAID solution.
Personally, I'm not a fan of physical media backup. Partly because of the time it takes to create them, but mostly just because it's one more pile of stuff to clutter up my office/house. Since iTunes took over the world my house has seemed a lot tidier, and I don't want to reverse that with stacks of work backups.
I've got 3 HDD's in my PC. Two 500GB drives, one for OS / Software, one for documents / files. And then a 1TB drive for backup of both.
I run a Windows Backup about once a week for my OS/Software along with a restore image, and then manually backup my documents / files once every couple days. The whole process takes about an hour. I usually run Windows backup while I go to lunch and then do the document backup when I come back since it takes a mater of minutes.
I back all my documents / files to an external 500GB about once a week too, this is used solely for backup purposes and not carried around with me. I also generally keep a small, 8GB USB stick with the latest set of files for any project I might be working on at that moment in time which I'll update daily until the project is done. For example, I'll just copy over the Max project folder at the end of each day.
I'll also use DropBox to store files, but not so much for backup for two reasons. Firstly because I don't trust myself with the way it auto-updates and I know I would somehow end up backing up over files I didn't mean to, or deleting files in one location and then clearing them from all the others too. Also, despite being on a fairly decent downstream connection, my upload speed is always terrible and anything over about 50MB takes forever to upload.
I guess the only downside to my backup solution is that it's not automated. But whenever I'm hesitant to backup due to time constraints, I'll just remind myself how much it would suck if I lost all my work and then think of how much fun I wouldn't have reinstalling my OS and software... that usually gives me the kick in the backside I need to make a quick backup.
You could of course also look into automated network backups a la 'Apple Time Machine' (I'm sure there's many other non-Apple versions of this, I've just only read about Time Machine) where you backup your computer onto a networked HDD automatically.
I've gone through a bunch of different backup setups, and pretty much every time I've actually had to recover a system there have been small issues that made me rethink it. This current system has gone through about 2 system crashes, and its handled them flawlessly. I've learned not to skimp on that stuff because its just not worth it. I've gotten to the point where if my hard drive fails I can swap in a new drive and restore the image created last night in less than an hour.
I highly recommend external raid enclosures though, you buy a 2 disk enclosure and everything is contained within that enclosure. You don't have to set anything up and worry about doing a tricky recovery to a raid system. I've had a couple 2 drive raid 1 enclosures before I upgraded to the 5 drive raid 5 enclosure, and they worked pretty well. The enclosures did tend to wear out and require replacement after a couple years, but all data on both disks was fine in every case and just needed to be installed in a new enclosure.
Any backup system that requires manual backup is doomed to failure. If you have a backup system, it needs to be automated because you will always forget just when the system fails.
I think my drawings are all on the internet, but..uhh.
Awesome, I do that too.
(for my PC I save just some hardware drivers and stuff like that)
@creationtwentytwo, That sounds like a good set up and I think its the kind of one I'll end up doing. Although perhaps just a 2 internal hard drive, and an external 1TB for portability. A restore Image is also something I have been putting off as I assumed it would take to long, but it would save a lot of problems. I'll take a look into it. Thanks for the tips!
As far as Drop Box goes, I have another concern to add. I've used it a few times and noticed that it can take while to upload files. But without anything to identify upload times or if files are being queued, I couldn't find a way to guarantee that a file has been fully uploaded without manually checking. That could be a pain for a large set files. Plus I have a lot of files that could do with backing up.
@ PredatorGSR, RAIDs Sound like they would be a solid choice if I had the money, as they'd probably solve my problems. Maybe a few years down the line it will be a worthy investment. The way I figure it, I would need at least a 2TB RAID to make a worth while (redundant) backups. At the moment though that's just out my price range
@ East, you make a convincing argument, now I'm even more paranoid :P. Although, in my eyes, making backups on-line still makes your files vulnerable in other threats as well.
There should be an icon on the folder/file you upload which looks like a little blue 'refreshing' icon while it's uploading which is then replaced with a green checkmark when it's done.
You can lose stuff online as well, but that's the beauty with on-site and off-site backup. You might lose one of them, but the chances of losing both at the same time is very slim!
Dropbox and iDisk are sync'd on 3 machines.
Paranoid is best
Can't recommend iDisk really, but a paid Dropbox account is pure gold