What makes up a good hard drive backup system for typical home use?
We’ve tons of old photos scanned into our computers, lots of financial documents, a fair collection of family jpg files, and so forth, now in excess of 40 gigs or so.
At present, we keep what we consider the most important stuff stored on both computers, a new laptop, and a creaky old desktop that’s still running Windows XP.
I’d like to know what’s out there that can back this up quickly, reliably, and relatively inexpensively.
And color me real ignorant about modern backup technology, as you educate me. I was pretty good in the old DOS days with tape backup, then was ok burning CD backups when my hard drive could be kept on a half dozen CDs, but I haven’t kept real current lately…
Hope this fits in GQ, I am looking for solid facts first, and opinions 2nd.
I prefer an online storage system: that way my external backup can’t crash or get lost or stolen. With 40 gigs of data, the initial upload would take forever, but after that, you can set only the changed data to be uploaded. Also you can have this happen automatically so you won’t suffer data loss due to procrastination. I’ve been using JungleDisk but there’s free software that also uses Amazon’s web servers.
External hard drives up to 500 gigabytes are pretty cheap these days. (I have three of them, giving me 1.5 terabytes on my home computer – I have a lot of anime episodes). If you have stored or two hard drives, it’s very unlikely that both would crash at the sane time.
I rotate two external USB hard drives. Each one, when in use, gets an initial manual full backup of my HD, and then an automatic incremental backup at 3 AM every night thereafter. About once every two weeks I swap out the drive on my desk for the one in my safe-deposit box, then delete the old files on the old drive, make a new full backup, and repeat.
I use Acronis True Image backup software. I have four programs, two for each drive (because each drive is recognized by its own drive letter): one for the initial full backup (which isn’t scheduled; I just run it when I swap drives) and one for the nightly automatic incremental. That one I have to reschedule when swapping drives so as to cancel the old one and run the new one, but it’s only a few clicks.
Mind, my critical data changes every day because I’m self-employed and keep work files on the computer.
I do a full backup (about 25 GB) just because I’d hate to have a crash and then realize I forgot something. It’s easier to just grab it all and ask questions later.
I think if you use a hard drive, it’s safest to keep it unplugged in case there’s a lightning strike or something, that could take out both at once. That has happened, I had a nearby lightning strike fry a bunch of electronics once. Also you might want to put it away so it doesn’t get stolen if someone steals your computer.
You could get a whole external drive and store that away. Another, more difficult way to do it is you can buy an enclosure, and buy the drive itself separately just like you would buy an internal drive for your computer. (You have to make sure the drive and case use the same kind of connection though.) That way, if you wanted you could take out the backup drive and store it away, and get another drive if you want for everyday use.
40 gigs should be cheap, you might even have trouble finding a drive that small now unless it’s a portable one.
Some external drives these days come with a push-button backup function, that’s supposed to back up your main drive automatically with one press. I haven’t used any of those though, so I don’t know much about them.
I used to run a RAID 1 with two 320-gig internal drives. I eventually gave up because every time there was a power failure or other improper shutdown (this was in Windows) I had to wait three hours or so rebuilding and remirroring the array, which could only be done from the BIOS. I couldn’t boot into a stable session of Windows until I did so; it basically went into an infinite reboot. These days, I just backup the important stuff onto both of those drives separately and burn a CD or DVD (depending on size) of the really important stuff.
If you have a Mac running os x 10.5, Time Capsule is coming out in Feb or Mar. This is a combination 802.11n router and automatic backup system available in 500GB and 1TB forms.
I use an external hard drive (360GB) for my photo backup. As a serious amateur photographer, I have about 200GB of photos on my HD, so they’re pretty important. I do DVD backups stored off site too.
I use a program called CopyTo Synchronizer, and it scans the folders I tell it to (e-mail, documents, and photos), and copies any new files and changed files to the external HD when I do a backup. It takes a few seconds, and that’s it…no worrying about tracking the new files, just turn on the external, open the program, and click “Backup.” Easy as can be.
External USB drives are the way to go right now. I used to leave mine at the office - not something I’d recommend in your case! Assuming you’re using a PC, format them as NTFS and use XP / Vista’s backup app. You can use a Copy / Paste but it will take far longer, especially if you’ve lots of little files (like my 200K emails - that’s count, not size). You’ll need to convert to NTFS to support files larger than 4GB.
Remember if you do this to make a backup of critical data to some other media once in a while (Blu-Ray’s not a bad idea if you already have one; I don’t think I’d buy a drive just to do it). “Piles’O’DVDs” is inconvenient but effective.
I’ve several times gone months before before noticing that some important file had been deleted/become corrupted – if I only had 4 weeks of backups, I’d have been deeply unhappy.
Time machine, (and any always-back-up-to-the-same disk(s) solution) has the same issue. They’re great on a day-to-day basis, but they don’t eliminate the need for a more permenant backup now and again.
External hard drives of decent size are very cheap (<$100). There is plenty of free backup software to make daily backups from there. I use Corbian backup which is pretty basic but gets the job done.
As noted, a house fire or a tornado could destroy all of your in-house equipment. On-line backups are the way to go. Mozie.com is a reputable company and will give you some free storage but the real deals are the unlimited backups at $4.95 a month. That is an incredible deal although, as noted, the initial backup can take days or longer. That isn’t a big deal unless you are on dial-up because it doesn’t really cause any interference with regular computing tasks. Incremental nightly backups after that only take a few minutes. You can restore any of your files to any PC in the world at any time.
I prefer having both but online backups are way cool and a great idea.
One thing to remember about any form of backup - once done, test you can successfully restore from it. I can’t tell you the number of customers who have found their backup blank, corrupt, or otherwise unusable.
One way to do that without having to write over your originial data is to make a bootable clone of your hard drive. With Macs, you can do this with either Disk Utility or a piece of shareware called SuperDuper. You can boot off of it to make sure everything works. I don’t know if you can do the same with Windows.
A DVD will store a lot of ordinary household data, and they make them in archival quality that will supposedly last more than a hundred years. The first time is a pain in the ass, probably, but do make two copies, and mail one of them to a trustworthy person who lives on a different tectonic plate than you do. Do this every few months, and you will be as safely backed up as just about everyone other than folks who pay thousands.
If you really need real time off site back up, well this is not for you. But you don’t.
Rather than a regular external hard drive, you might consider a Drobo. It’s a USB enclosure that works more or less like a flexible RAID.
Pros:
[ul]
[li]Protects against hardware failure. Like RAID, it stores redundant information to ensure that you won’t lose anything if a single drive dies. Unlike RAID, it automatically reorganizes your data when that happens (as long as there’s enough free space on the remaining drives), and within a few hours after the failure, you’re protected again.[/li][li]Combines the space of several drives. You can put in up to four drives, any size you want, and they’ll be combined into one virtual drive. (Or more than one: USB limits a single virtual drive to 2 TB, so any more than that and you’ll have multiple virtual drives.) Unlike RAID, they don’t all have to be the same size. You can buy drives at whatever size is most cost-effective at the moment, and when larger drives get cheaper, you can pop out a small one and replace it with a big one, without even shutting down.[/li][li]Easy to use. They call it a “data storage robot”, which I think is a little unfair because it doesn’t move on its own, but it does take care of everything for you. There’s no administration work, and you don’t need to install any software; you just plug and play, and glance at the front panel every so often to see how full it is and if any drives need replacing.[/li][/ul]
Cons:
[ul]
[li]It’s pricey. A Drobo costs $500 (although you might find one for $300 or so by looking around), and it comes empty: you have to provide the SATA drives to fill it up.[/li][li]It’s USB-only. It’s about as fast as any other USB hard drive, but that’s still slower than an internal drive or eSATA.[/li][li]It uses a nonstandard format on the drives. You normally don’t have to worry about that – you can format it on a PC or Mac with standard software and it acts just like a normal hard drive – but if the Drobo itself dies, you can’t get any of your data off the drives until you find another Drobo to put them in.[/li][/ul]
I back stuff up differently based on content and which kind of machine it is on. I’m a Mac guy, and on my Macs I use Carbon Copy Cloner. But I have lots of data on Windows systems for work. Microsoft Synctoy is free, and a pretty neat way of manually creating backups. I have a pair of external disks I use to back up both of my Windows machines. I use Synctoy profiles that are set up to “contribute” and not delete older content.
I won’t be able to image and restore a crashed Windows drive with this software but I should be able to recover documents, etc. Obviously Macs are much better in his respect.
