Category: Geeks r Us
Hi - I have a bit of a dilemmer.
Most people on here would vouch for the fact that i'm a bit of a geek; this means that I have lots (hundreds of gigs) of files that i've amassed over the years.
I am also very poor - the only box that is useable that I can call my own is a 1ghz with 512mb ram, but over the time i've bought or been given more and more drives that I can slave or put into caddies to deal with the increase in files.
I was thinking about my situation the other day and came to the conclusion that give or take I have about 550 gb of stuff oer many drives that is no ware else. This is quite bad, I mean for example, I have important stuff on 10 year old drives and yet more important stuff on a handfull of maxtor drives.
Now to brighten up the situation a little, about 250gb is in one location and the rest in another, but even if the 250 lot went missing or was subject to a fire or anything, i'm looking at big big losses.
So i'm wondering what do you do about backup?
Hosting isn't an option - for that kinda size i'd probably be better of getting my own server, which I can't afford.
I could go get one of the wd 1tb drives but that would have to weight untill january and i dunno, I still get a bit queasy about all the backups beeing on one drive.
So, anyone have any nice, cheap backup methods?
Chears, BEN.
go to www.carbonite.com £40 per year approx, about eighty dollars for two years. upload the whole lot to their servers using their programme, and bang! it's all there, the backup is unlimted, and you can restore all, or one file if you want to. it keeps a constant watch on your system to check for modified or deleted files. if you delete off your hd, it deletes off the server! as easy as that. hth.
The only problem I can se with that solution, is that you have to have allot of upload bandwidth.
Or spread your uploads an backups over time, considering how much info you're uploading, in other words, don't do them all at once, unless you're on a t3:)...
How many gigs of stuff do you have, and how many gigs of total hard drive space? That'll determine your backup. Also if your worried about damages such as a fire go out buy 100 dvd's for $20 burn all your stuff to them and store them somewhere off site. Then keep burning any new files you get to dvd every month or so that way you'll never lose more then a months worth of data if your house burns down.
I'd say get a tape drive, but they're seriously expensive.
To answer the last person's post, he's got close to 600 gb of stuff that he needs to backup, and even the 1 tb drives aren't exactly cheep.
Though, gettting 2 of those, and backing up the stuff will take time unless he can get a ESATA PCI card for his machine, if it can handle the 3 gbps transfer rate.
The reason I suggest ESATA over USB 2.0 is that its almost 7 times faster in theory.
Dvds aren't good for long term archival storage, btw.
I must get round to destroying a load of dvds. i've got like thousands. well maybe a few hundred from years back. dam. hehehe. now back up onto external hDD and server.
5) They'll last more then 4 or 5 years and with the way storage is increasing by the time you have to worry about the dvd's going bad you'll have a 10 tb drive.
You could go out and buy a few drives, back your files up on them and store them off site (Parents' house or something or friend's house).
If that is too expensive, you could sign up for Amazon S3. Storage costs 15 cents a gig per month. Upload costs 10 cents per gig. Download costs 18 cents per gig.
This solution is pretty cheep and they store your files on rade arrays and keep plenty of backups. Also, your space is encrypted but with a cort order or something, they might be able to get to the files so if you are really concerned about your privacy, go put the secure files in a truecrypt volume.
Also, there is publicftp.com. You can create a user account for free. You get an ftp space (user:password@publicftp.com). Unlimited storage, good upload and download speeds all free. I'm not sure if backups are made there but this should prove ok for you.
This isn't the most secure place though. If you have a file called hello.txt, someone could download it by going to publicftp.com/home/username/hello.txt.
Of course, they would have to know the name of the file and there is still truecrypt as an option.
Is all of that 550gig of data stuff that you absolutely need to keep? If so, and an online remote backup service isn't possible, you could try this as a short-term measure. Decide what data you would be most devastated to lose, then buy some blank DVDs, backup all the stuff on your largest removeable drive, and format it. Once it's clear, put all the most important data on this drive. If there is spare space, start filling it with the next most valuable data, so you can use every byte on all the drives. It will probably take some time but you can start to shuffle your data around and keep the most valuable data away.
In the long-term you need to work on reducing the number of drives you have as it's inefficient in terms of cost and resources. Assuming that your main PC drive isn't very big, you may want to aim for a couple of large (700gig) portable drives in the long run, one for usable storage and for storing off-site.
Finally never forget the old MTBF (mean time before failure) of hard drives; a brand-new drive is just as likely to crash as a years-old one (I know, it's happened to me!) so if the data's as important as you say, go out and get those portable drives now! :-)
dvds: no good: they don't last very long. If you rely on DVD's, keep them in a secure, hard cover cd case and put them in a cool dry and dark place. Heat and moister aren't good for the surface and light will destroy them.
If you can aford the multiple hard drives, mirror your data but unplug the mirror drive until you need it again to protect against malware that might sweep all drives. If you have a virus and need to mirror say music or something (never back up programs when you have a virus), I recommend bootting into Linux and doing it so that the virus doesn't instantly spread to the mirror drive.
If this isn't possible, read my earlier post. I know mirrors are sort of a waste of space but when you want to back stuff up, they and online storage are really your own choice.
If you get inportant information that you need to back up, I highly recommend truecrypt so the drive doesn't get into the wrong hands.
I store all confidentual information in truecrypt volumes because if the wrong person got to my machines or drives, I'm screwed. Also, I can just throw out my hard drive when it becomes useless; I don't need to worry about making sure no one can get to my data.
I use mozy.com which is $4.95/month per computer, unlimited storage. They have the funding which suggests that they'll be around for a while. Their client uploads changed files once per day or on a schedule that you supply, only uploads changed portions of files, and if you wish can be configured to use only part of your available bandwidth.
I personally don't like the idea of online backups. First there is the possibility of other people hacking into my files secure or not and what if the transfer was corrupted and never knew about it until you wanted to recovery that backup. Second of all, I really highly suggest you look on craigslist.org. It is a free classifieds site. Look in your area for a cheap server machine. I bought my Dell Power edge for $150 with 2 30GB scsi hard drives. Now I realize that would be not enough, but it would be a start considering you could replace those drives with larger ones. Plus, with servers, you can have multiple drives for example my server can hold up to 6 scuzzi drives. I still need to find someone who can give me a key for my server. Having a couple of linux machines with dual hard drives would be very useful considering you don't need a fast machine or new box for that matter. A pentium 2 or 3 would suffice considering that a core linux system is all you'd need (text interface only). I would never do online backups. I use a 2k3 server and have that dell which has debian but that's just me.
As for spike, that solution would be pricy. As for me and tape drives. My dell has one but don't have any tapes hehee.