backing up data (1 Viewer)

[taubstumm]

nerd thread alert.

i have a laptop and an external hard drive, and between the two of them, there's a load of stuff - music, films, documents, all that kinda stuff - that i want to put safely away. by 'put safely away', i mean that i want to be able to go along ten years from now and drag stuff out and mess around with it and all that.

what's the best thing to do?

the external hard drive is grand, but i'd like something a bit more permanent. some people have told me that dvd-r is good, but then others have warned me that they degrade. plus, i don't want to spend my life burning discs. some people just keep on buying more and more external hard drives. that seems a bit foolhardy. apparently data tape is good, but then i've no idea what that is to begin with.

advice please.

 

[nofriendo]

Could you really fill one of these bad boys!!
http://gear.ign.com/articles/611/611240p1.html

 

[Pantone247]

Could you really fill one of these bad boys!!
http://gear.ign.com/articles/611/611240p1.html

with Toms lust for filthy lo-quality trashy anarachist porn MPEGs?

he'd have it filled in days, not weeks...

 

[ICUH8N]

Data Tapes are good, but expensive. For example, a 200GB Native/400GB compressed Ultrium drive will run you about €5k or thereabouts, or about half that for a 100GB/200GB model. Also, I've only ever used/seen SCSI models, though it's not unreasonable to assume there's a firewire/USB 2.x version floating around, though it would be slower. The tapes themselves have an archival life of 30 years though, and are as reliable as you're going to find.

//edit: the tapes are rated for about 250 (I think?) passes (backups, effectively) before you have to replace them, and the Ultrium 3 drives will do up to 800GB compressed.

 

[taubstumm]

a 200GB Native/400GB compressed Ultrium drive will run you about €5k or thereabouts,

five thousand quid for four hundred gigabytes? ah here.

 

[Theseus Mock]

just use dvdr's. eventhough there's a lot of codswallop about CD/DVD degradation, they'll last for yeaaaaaars.

 

[ICUH8N]

five thousand quid for four hundred gigabytes? ah here.

Yeah, I know. It's not a consumer product, but you asked about tape drives, so rather than just replying "pfft forget it, too expensive"....
That having been said, I know of nothing more reliable in terms of removable storage.

You might be able to get a used/reconditioned one on ebay, but at this point you're probably asking yourself if DVD-RW or a cheap raid array isn't a better compromise.

Also, I'll have a spare internal SCSI 100/200 ultrium drive in a month or two (upgrading) if you badly need one.

 

[oh shit]

haven't you ever heard of a 'diary'? just write it down.

 

[oh shit]

other tips: cut out movie reviews, that way you'll be able to remember what happened and pretend to have an opinion on it,
for music i tend to call my own answerphone and just hum it to myself for later,
and sometimes if it's really important information, i'll see about a tastefully placed tattoo.

 

[La La]

haven't you ever heard of a 'diary'? just write it down.

yeah tom, jesus. hardrives are sooooo macho.

emo's the way to go, y'know

 

[egg_]

HHB DVD-Rs are supposed to be very reliable, see www.hhb.co.uk

 

[pete]

ahhh backups.... now this is a subject close to my heart. I have hundreds of gigs of stuff that i need to back up, but no sensible way to do it. DVD-R's just don't cut it - the contents of 1 miniDV tape works out at about 20gigs for starters. Tape solutions are either too low capacity or too expensive.

So for starters, I'm considering sticking a couple of mirrored 300Gb drives (€120 each from komplett this week) into an old spare PC I have (free), which would cope with the contents of all my existing backup DVDs (which I don't truest anyway) ... But does consumer level RAID support mirroring, or is it just striping for performance? This I do not know. RAID5 would be nicer though - that's the dream.

Of course making the backup is only half the battle - having a backup of your data safely stored in your attic isn't much use if your house burns down. So for the important stuff I suppose you have to start thinking about offsite storage, and this is where the external drives come into play. Backup your backups to external units (encrypted, of course) and drop them down to the ma's.

Sorted.

 

[ICUH8N]

encrypting 300gb will either take days or incur a serious performance hit if done on the fly, no? I've pondered raid myself, but haven't come up with anything sensible as of yet.

 

[taubstumm]

words in this thread that i think i need explained to me:

cheap raid array

mirrored drives

does consumer level RAID support mirroring, or is it just striping for performance?

RAID5

Backup your backups to external units (encrypted, of course)

now, i know i can start hunting through google to find out what these mean, but would anyone be willing to give me a bit of a translation? (and an indication as to whether this means i can reliably back stuff up for less than five grand?) thanks.

 

[ICUH8N]

raid array: redundant array of inexpensive drives; you buy some small, cheap hard drives, and a controller card which turns them into one large hard/logical drive, which is fault-tolerant and can cope with the failure of one (usually) small drive - it just keeps working until you swap the drive and then rebuilds it.

mirrored drive, raid1: you have 2 drives, the second drive is a real-time mirror of your primary drive. this is good, in the sense that it's fast, and it's reasonably fault-tolerant.

mirroring versus striping: not entirely sure what pete means, maybe that your mirrored drive was a raid1 array - pretty cool as opposed to raid0 (fast but shite - data is split or striped over two drives, as opposed to mirrored, twice the capacity, but if one fails, you're fucked)

raid5: the most flexible implementation, each disk (minimum of 3) contains both data and parity (used for recovery) information, if one disk fails, performance isn't adversely affected, which is nice. you pop in a new drive and it's back. you can add as many disks as you want to a raid5 array, in theory. this means big, reasonably highly performant logical drives with good fault tolerance.

I have no clue what he was referring to about removable backups, really. a removable raid array would rule, but i've never seen one, and it would have to be raid1, because it's the only raid implementation which lends itself to removal. pete?

 

[pete]

mirroring versus striping: not entirely sure what pete means,

Just that plenty of motherboards now come with basic RAID controllers built in. I'm just not sure if they support mirroring or not (mainly because i can never remember what all the numbers for RAID variants mean, except for RAID5 which is our minimum standard in work). Anyway I have a horrible feeling that they just do striping, which is no use at all (unless you need the extra performance).

I have no clue what he was referring to about removable backups, really. a removable raid array would rule, but i've never seen one, and it would have to be raid1, because it's the only raid implementation which lends itself to removal. pete?

the idea is that you have your onsite backup on a nice, safe, fault tolerant RAID array, but you also maintain a secondary offsite copy on an external drive in case the house containing your nice, safe, fault tolerant RAID array burns down, or similar. belt and braces, innit.

We do something similar in work - we run incremental backups throughout the day to a fairly large tape library, with tapes (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) regularly sent out to secure offsite storage.