Backing up your PC - who doesn't do them, who really does, and how do you do it?

  • Thread starter Thread starter DaveO
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Yep, I have. But I found two reasons to wait, at least for now.

One is that there are still competing standards so which formats should I try to support? At least I've finally seen a drive that supports DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVD+RW, I just don't know how well it works.

Also, for video projects I'd still need up to 6 DVD's to back up a single project (4 GB of disk for 20 of video is what I've seen from the software/hardware vendors).
 
ots of people just use data DAT or tape drives for large amounts of storage. kind of expensive though. $600 for a DAT drive.
 
DATs possible, at least DDS-4 would let me put 40 GB on a single tape. They are expensive though, I thought a DDS-4 drive would cost me about $1200 - $1500, but then again I haven't had to buy one at work for a while. Just to get that kind of capacity I'd probably be willing to pay the $15-$20 per tape too.

It's pricey, but I started this whole process thinking this is the kind of thing I'd end up doing. I just started this thread to get some other ideas, or confirm that high density tape (if you can really call DAT high density these days) is the only real solution.
 
I use DDS3 (24gb compressed) at work, and the tapes are about 11 bucks a piece. The drives are a lot cheaper too.
 
Here's my problem with backing up to tape - virtually all tape software only runs under Windows. So if my system drive crashes, I can't even run the software that restores it. I have to spend an hour to install Windows again before I can restore Windows. What the hell kind of logic is that?

With Ghost, I can write my images in pieces on CDR disks. If my C: drive completely dies, I can go to Best Buy, get a new drive, and pop it in unformated. Then boot from a floppy disk (with DOS CD driver), run Ghost, and I'm done. However many minutes later it takes to read the CDs and I'm 100% restored.
 
RWhite
Hi again :) and thanks for your input in the other thread. I think for the system Ghost is best but for files you need something else.

Hans
www.hagen.nu
 
RWhite,

I agree with what you said, but I'll also second what hrn said. It's backing up GBs worth of data that I'm concerned about.

In fact, in some ways I almost don't care if I have to rebuild the O/S from scratch after some kind of catastrophic failure. Yeah, it would suck having to take the time to do it, but at least I'd have a nice fresh system again.


Dave
 
I have mostly Unix machines for my home based consulting business, but the Windows-based studio DAW hangs off my network as well. I back up all my machines nightly to an Exabyte jukebox hanging off one of my Unix servers, which also runs Samba. So I can just do an smbtar and back up its drives the same way I do my business filesystems with the nightly level 7 dump. The nightly tapes are recycled as needed, so that I always have a complete save set of the previous day's state.

Once a month I do a full level 0 dump, and then pull those tapes and put them offsite in my safe deposit box for disaster recovery. The way I look at it, my music is just as important to me as my business data: that limits the amount I risk losing via a hardware failure or user error. The business keeps the roof over my head: I have to take it that seriously.

By far the most important thing is to make backups be a) automatic and b) transparent. If you have to interrupt your normal workflow, you simply won't do them often enough, or reliably enough. It's human nature! IMNSHO, it is absolutely worth spending a little money to get some sort of automated backup mechanism in place- whether a simple disk copy mechanism with Ghost, all the way up to a completely absurd tape-based deal like mine (which probably nobody here but me could possibly justify).

Doesn't matter what you decide to do- just do it, and do it today. It is worth the effort.
 
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