best way for large backups?

[nawfal]

i think the best way is to buy another hard disk drive?!

i mean, what medium is there for huge backups, i cant be bothered with many cartridges etc. you can get a 250gb hdd for 50 quid just use that instead. dvd recorders are a joke, 4.7gb dont do jack.

any other ideas? i have 800gb btw

 

[dave87]

External Hard disks - someone was doing a 2tb external hard disk, quite reasonably priced too

 

[Ham]

Daves got it. Althogh internal are good also.

 

[FragTek]

I've found that external hd's are the easiest and most affordable way to back up stuff... And they make RAID external drives these days which have maddd capacity, 1+TB.

 

[nawfal]

isnt internal cheaper?

 

[FragTek]

isnt internal cheaper?

Yeah definately is, and recommended if you have the space. I just happen to like the portability factor of the external drives.

 

[Toxteth O'Grady]

If you have a gigabit capable LAN one of these will give you the quickest backup times.

TOG

 

[Nagaru]

An old pc with some hard drives in it could make a very cheap NAS. If you used Linux or Windows XP Pro you could set up a software RAID for redundancy.

 

[nathan]

i always recommend using external hard drives, then you have the added bonus of taking the backup of site (think if you have a fire). which you should do anyway if your data is valueble. There is also the "remote backup" that companies offer. You install there software, it looks for changes in files that you specify then uploads them to there server. This is getting pretty cheap now a days. An example would be bunka backup.

Just a couple of options for you.

 

[Enigmachine]

I have tape backups, an external drive and a NAS basically...

The tapes are incredibly expensive, you can buy a HD for the price of replacement tapes, and let's not even mention the tape drive itself! Their only real advantage is portability, you can slip a tape into a pocket and take it to a bank safe or something easily.

But a small (2.5) external hard drive is just as portable, and you can use is as a standard drive, which is excellent.

A NAS is nice, but if you have a flood, a fire or an electrical failure, you lose your backup... and it's definitely not portable.

I use a 3.5 200 Gig hard drive AND a Subversion copy to a NAS so that I can restore data very rapidly if the failure was on only one machine, but can also get the backup if it's a very bad event...

The most important thing, imho, is the backup software. Being able to do incremental backups to any media you want is a blessing - I still haven't found the perfect, free software to do this on Windows. :|

 

[FarFarAway]

@work we have NAS and SAN for large backups. don't expect you have the cash to create a SAN tho

 

[Ham]

Wth is a nas?

 

[FarFarAway]

NAS = Network Attached Storage

SAN = Storage Area Network

 

[nathan]

really wouldnt recommend tapes, many people dont know it but they only meant to have a shelf life of 3 months.

 

[Enigmachine]

Wth is a nas?

Basically it's a low-powered server computer with a bunch of hard drives attached... You access it using your network instead of a local drive. They're a good use of those really old machines you may have rotting in your basement. You don't really need a lot of computing power, in fact the lower the better so it doesn't cost a whole lot in electricity.

Look up FreeNAS and others for software to build your own NAS.

 

[FragTek]

Wirelessly posted (LG Fusic: Opera/8.01 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/2.0.4719/1372; en; U; ssr))

really wouldnt recommend tapes, many people dont know it but they only meant to have a shelf life of 3 months.

not to mention theyre about as fast as a sloth on oxy's. nas or other external drive is probably ur best route. or u can wait for the new hitachi svod to go mainstream.