Advice on backup needed

[djeyewater]

I have a growing collection of photos on my PC that I need to backup. Currently they're backed up to a 500GB e-SATA drive, but soon I will have more than 500GB to backup. I do a manual backup every few days, so if my main drive died I might lose a few days images, which would be annoying but at least most of the data would be backed up.

So I was wondering if I should get another internal drive and RAID it or another drive and a NAS box. I want to make sure that if there was a power surge or something goes wrong electrically with the PC the data would be safe.

Would appreciate any advice/suggestions.

Thanks

Dave

 

[mooseracing]

First thing everyone will say is RAID is not a backup solution.

With that being said there are 2 ways I would go about it:

First would be run two drives of the same size. One you put all the files on, the other use a backup software (ntbackup, Acronis, or whatever) and schedule nightly backups to the spare drive.

Second would just be to purchase a drive cloning software and dup it to the other drive every night and schedule automatically.

 

[TheKub]

RAID 1 would protect you from 1 failed hard drive. It will not protect you from viruses or accidental deletions. Also if there is some surge strong enough to damage 1 drive odds are its going to smoke them both.

If the data is truly that important too you off-site backup is the only sure way. So you can do the long boring job of burning 100+ DVDs or dropping the cash on a blu-ray burner. Also, you can look into online backup services such as Carbonite or Amazons S3.

 

[MichaelD]

Backing up 500GBs of data (or anywhere close to it) sort of limits you. I.E. burning to DVDs is out...there's BluRay but at $20 a DVD...not gonna happen.

Here's some things I've done:

RAID1 mirror/RAID5 array (but as stated, if the whole PC gets smoked, you'll lose all drives)
External HD that's ONLY plugged in/connected when manually making a backup. At all other times it's in a closet. Many people make the mistake of leaving the external HD connected and turned on 24/7. That's not what it's for.
Burn lots of DVDs

My current backup solution is a RAID5 array on a hardware controller w/battery backup. System is protected by a big UPS. AND an external HD which is controlled as described above. I backup the RAID5 array to the external drive about once a month. But except for my email (personal,not work) not much of my data changes on a daily basis. I have most of my photos and my .pst file burnt to DVDs as well. I have copies of said DVDs stored offsite. The odds of losing everything at the same time are very slim.

 

[djeyewater]

Thanks for the replies. I don't really have regular access to somewhere to store offsite backups unfortunately. I don't think web backup is feasible either, I only have 256kb/s upstream and with the amount of data needing to be uploaded regularly it wouldn't work.

It sounds like I would be best getting a UPS and keeping my backup seperate to my PC, for the moment swapping out my 500GB e-SATA drive for a 1TB one would probably be cheapest, and then maybe get a NAS when that's full up.

Cheers

Dave