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I've just told my home server to backup all of my documents and photos. In amongst all those files are my stories, some finished, some being edited, some half written and some storyboarding from new ideas. If I lost any of it I would be devestated. Even if you onlybackup onto a USB stick then, providing you don't use that stick for anything else, it should give you the insurance necessary should your main pc/laptop have a sudden memory loss. So, who doesn't backup, and why?
Shiraz
Backing up
My HD is 1 TB, and I plan to buy a 1 or 2 TB to back up to. Funds are an issue at the moment, though I did notice that a 1 TB is $65. Any suggestions?
Gwen
Actually....
I suggest, for short term back ups, use at least two USB memory sticks. In case one of the sticks goes bad you have not lost anything. And back up at least, daily. Also, for long term, used data discs. With multiple discs burnt per back up. And if it is a little data, use a CD, a few gigs, a DVD, several gigs, a Blu-ray disc. But, do not use dual-layer disc, the glue between the layers break down. Use single layer only. And the reason for using a CD in this day an age for back up is that a minor scatch on a CD, the data can still be retrieved, while you lose data from minor scratches with a DVD, or Blu-ray disc.
Thoughts on backing Up
I agree that thumb drives and optical media are good options, but there are always caveats. Thumb drives can be lost, broken, corrupted, or just fail. CD's and DVD's can be lost, scratched or broken (always verify your writes though; most software defaults to not doing so. ) They are read only devices when closed, so are resistant to virus corruption and accidental deletion. External hard drives are hard to lose, and transfer faster than most thumb drives, but are too easy to drop, and run too hot.
I recommend using redundant copies with multiple types of media. Too many copies are always better than none.
For writers, I should point out that typing 4 gig of text to fill a DVD disk would probably wear out two keyboards, or in other words, text uses little space, as compared to other media. Most epub novels on Gutenberg are well under 200k.
That works out to 5 novels to a meg, or about 20,000 on a DVD. Multiple backups for text are therefore fairly inexpensive.
All that said, for writers, I am a FIRM believer in hard copy.
A ream of paper 3 inches thick holds 500 pages. A two drawer file cabinet can hold 5000 pages. Paper is vulnerable to fire and water. I would recommend laser printing your archive copy. ( I believe fused toner is more water resistant than ink, and less prone to fade. ) I have found that optical character software (OCR) works surprisingly well on scanned documents. Even if you do not use hard copy to archive, proofreading on printouts is easier than on a screen, and the proof copies can be useful for short term story recovery.
I am obviously a bit excessive about backups, but the external hard drive I dropped and damaged was not backed up completely, and I did not get everything back.
So, back up, back up again, and back up some more.
Too much data
Rather than backup just my stories I tend to backup everything except the operating system (it ain't windows!). Unfortunately, just my docs & photos comes to 36Gb so DVD backup is out of the question. As I don't buy Blueray discs I can't see the point of installing a Blueray drive until I next need to replace one of the external DVD drives. That leaves me with one real option (I'm not going for tape archives) and that's to backup to a separate physical hard drive. I then copy the latest two backups onto an external hard drive that isn't normally connected to any of my systems. This gives me multiple levels of backup with the ability to re-install quickly.
I haven't mentioned backup up videos or music. My video storage is in the region of 5Tb so backing that up is another issue entirely, anyone got a spare tape drive?
Shiraz
Get a two drive external
Get a two drive external enclosure, and plug in two 3 terabyte drives as either RAID0 or JBOD. Use that for backups. Yes, it's more failure prone than other RAID, but you're using it as an emergency backup. It's unlikely to fail at the same time as the main system unless you get hit by lightning.
For THAT worry - just back it up, then unplug it. Plug it in once a month or so for an update.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Please do not use RAID-0 for backups
RAID-0 means that you have at least two drives sort of chained together. Two 2TB drives would give you 4TB of storage. That is the good bit. The downside is that a failure in one of the drives means that your WHOLE data is gone and gone for GOOD unless you have several thousand $$$ to spend on data recovery and even then it might not be possible to get it all back.
I have at least two copies of everything. However I have some 5TB of photos. I have added some 420Gb this year. Everytime I press the shutter I add 80Mb to my storage. I use a Nikon D800 Camera so this is pretty extreme. I have Two NAS Drives each with some 12TB of storage but each one runs in RAID-1. Raid-1 is where you mirror whats on one drive on another so a failure on one disk is recoverable. However this is not a cheap option.
For those on a budget then by all means get some desktop HDD's. 500Gb ones are pretty cheap these days. Get at least TWO and preferably from different manufacturers and copy your valuable stuff to both.
An even lower cost alternative is to use a series of USB sticks. 16Gb USB-3 sticks are easily obtained. Don't go for cheapo E-Bay drives. If you do then you may have a really bad experience. Buy the best quality drive you can afford. Then rotate them. One drive then the next, then the next. If you can afford them get enough to follow a 'Rotating Tower of Hanoi' pattern (google for it). I've used this for tapes backups for the last 30 years. The advantage of this is that you can gradually add to your collection over time. LABEL every drive and keep records of what one you use when (not on the computer!).
Finally, don't blindly trust a copy operation. Verify the copy against the original and then you will be good to go.
{IT Professional since 1975}
Yes, you CAN use RAID-0 and
Yes, you CAN use RAID-0 and JBOD for backups. It simply means that it's not as reliable, long term, as a single drive. Unfortunately, if you want reasonable backup times with data sizes over 3 terabytes, you don't have much choice. (Yes, you could REALLY spend money and build a RAID5,6 or 10, but let's be reasonable)
Most people want a backup of their data, in case of failure. That is, a copy of the data that isn't stored in the same spot as their main data, and won't fail at the same time as the primary drive. RAID-0 does this just as well as anything else. What you _don't_ want to do is make it so that the RAID-0 is the _only_ place your data is stored, as you've doubled your chances of failure. If I needed a simple backup of 12 TB of data, I wouldn't be buying 6 3TB drives and making a RAID6 or RAID5+1, I'd just buy 4, do a JBOD/RAID-0, and run the backups. Or, if you're really paranoid, _two_ of them, and alternate. They're backups, they're not mainline drives, so they don't need quite the redundancy (or cost). If one fails, you replace the drives, and the next backup is a full backup, and not an incremental. Drive replacement cost is the same no matter what form of RAID you use.
IT Professional since 1995, working with SCSI and RAID since 1991 (RAID a bit later)
P.S. Forgot to mention. Tapes have a limited lifespan - most manufacturers recommend throwing them away after 50 uses. (one year at once per week).
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
With all the open bays
With all the open bays in most desk tops, an extra hard drive is no big deal. Something about half your main hard drive should be sufficient. Use it only for back up purposes. If your data is organized under say a "computer" folder, back up becomes as easy as drag and drop a single folder. What's more, it goes on in the back ground while you go about your business.
Then of course there are a number of cloud services out there.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Cloud services
Backing up 36Gb to a Cloud host is not an option, that's the problem with keeping everything! My home server is my cloud, I do most of my work on laptops or even tablets and can access the server indoors or anywhere where I have an internet connection as the server has a domain name. Therefore I only keep one live copy of the data rather than different versions spread across multiple devices. It also means that I could cross a border with an almost empty laptop and not worry about inspection seeing as I can connect back to base to read or edit documents, images etc. My daughter stores her schoolwork on the server and accesses it on her own laptop, it also means I can easily email her work to her if she's forgotten to take it with her to school.
That's my solution but it's meant beefing up the server slightly - fibre internet, 8Gb RAM, 12TB HD etc etc! All the drive bays are in use and there's no more internal SATA2 ports available as it's 4x3TB so any secondary backup is via USB.
I have lost data often enough due to faulty machines that backing up is essential if you want to have continuity.
For limited budgets, an external 500Gb or 1Tb drive is not that expensive currently but as said above, a pair of inexpensive USB memory sticks would suffice, or even a stack of blank DVDs if you have a burner (and the total data size is under 4.7Gb)
Shiraz
Here we got the Microsoft
Here we got the Microsoft Office 365 subscription and it comes with an 1TB of space on One Drive, so I mostly use that and my 50gb of space on Google Drive thanks to my Moto X to do my backups. I had problems with external HDs and DVDs in the past and I think that in the case of the office subscription, the space MS gives you on their one drive already justifies the price (US$ 79,99 annually or US$ 7,99 monthly) and you can install it up to 5 machines and share the subscription up to 5 people in your family. It also gives you 60 free minutes monthly on Skype. Also installing office on smartphones is free.
Andrea
always a good idea
saved 500GB data when I tested fedora and it corrupted my partitions [ it went lvm ( raid ) on them and cost me the info on the home partition. ]
Fortunately, only the day before I had backed ALL 500 GB onto dvd.
as far as cloud services go, I use Dropbox constantly, documents Im working on are in my dropbox folder and synched between their server and my 4 computers.
I have found one cloud storage service that seems to be fairly decent, 50 GB space, free. [ Firewire, which is the new name for putlocker ] It gets used by a lot of people sharing movies and tv shows on the link sites.
Stupidity is a capital offense. A summary not indictable.
Backuping Up
I'm using Windows until the warranty runs out then probably switch to Linux.
I have a dual drive laptop. I keep system software, software I purchase or download, scratch space and stuff that doesn't really change or is confidential on the 1st drive and data, configuration, passwords, videos, music and pictures on the encrypted 2nd drive.
I backup, mostly daily, what has changed on the data drive to an external RAID 1 drive so I always have a pretty current full copy of the data drive. It only takes a few minutes to execute a command file of Robocopy commands.
Usually Saturday night I disable all the non system start-up programs, the page-file, delete backup catalogs, protection files and log files. I do a boot time defrag of 1st drive and then clear all the free space and unused MFT entries. I finally make an image backup of the 1st drive before enabling normal operations.
I keep the current and previous image backup.
I also have image backups of milestones such as factory installation, factory plus addtional software, patches and configuration so I have a starting point other than factory installation discs.
I usually don't shutdown my PC except when I go somewhere or do weekly maintenance (clean, blow out fans and air intakes). I also keep hibernate disabled by default. There is a lot of potentially confidential information in hibernate files.
I use just plain OEM drives to make off site copies. I use a SABRENT USB 3.0 TO SATA/IDE 2.5/3.5/5.25-INCH Hard Drive Converter With Power Supply & LED Activity Lights [4TB Support] (USB-DSC9) from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/SABRENT-5-25-INCH-Converter-Activity-U.... It costs $22.99 and you can plug in a lot of different drives. I usually copy files overnight, re-wrap drive in antistatic, padding, zip lock and take to off site location to swap with one there.
I had a home server before it gave up the ghost. I configured and backed it up pretty much the same. My previous laptop was slow and after the blue smoke was released when I spilled tea in it, I retired both to spare parts and got the new laptop.
Finally, I don't trust online backups where the owner of the site controls the encryption passwords. I have been looking at NAS (Network-attached storage) devices and have been saving money but the current offerings leave a lot to be desired. Might end up with another server with 16-20 TB of space I can RAID.
For those who are truly
For those who are truly paranoid about their data, and can afford it, here's your offsite solution.
OwnCloud.
Set up a server at a friend's house or similar. Use dyndns to set up a name. Synchronise your home system to the remote system. Just seed the machine in the same room over the LAN to start, then take it offsite.
If your house burns down, it's elsewhere, and complete.
Think of it as your own personal dropbox. (maybe offer to do the same for the friend on your system)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Free and good backup solutions
If you want offsite backup (which I recommend) a free way to achieve it is by opening a free gmail account and emailing your files to that account as often as you want.
Or you can just signup for Dropbox. Contrary to reports, they weren't hacked last week. An advantage of Dropbox is that you can edit the same file on another computer or mobile device while you're away from your regular machine.
If you want really secure storage, you could pay for the encrypted storage service Edward Snowden recommends: SpiderOak. Good encryption, nice service. I use them for financial data and for storage of really sensitive material.
Personally, I never liked USB drives - too easy to lose, or worse, have someone pick up because they want to use it for something else. I can't count the number of drives I've had go kaput.
not as think as i smart i am