I need to buy a backup device for my home computer setup. Backing up to CD-R is no longer a practical option.
So I’m thinking about a tape backup of some sort. But most of the devices out there are aimed at commercial use, nightly backups, high thru-put etc and priced similarly. I really don’t need anything that powerful. No one seems to be doing any tape backup for the home market, does no one backup their home computers?
What I need:-
Win2k and higher compatible drivers.
Something between 5Gb & 10Gb capacity.
Something that’s not obsolete technology, or likely to be within a year or so. I don’t plan to be spending again on this kind of thing anytime soon.
What would be nice, but not essential:-
Linux capatability
Mac compatability
Networking capability
30Gb capacity
Anyone with experience or opinions on this kind of thing?
My backup system is a second HDD in a removable tray/case. Every month or so, I’ll run defrag/AV scan and then image C: to D: using PowerQuest DriveImage, although Norton Ghost would work just as well.
The second HDD then lives in a small fire safe.
Drive+removable tray+software should set you back no more than $150, unless you want a super big HDD.
How often are you thinking of backing up? DVD+/-R are ~$1/disc currently, with DVD+/-RW not being significantly more. Backing up 5-10 GB shouldn’t be too bad with that, though backing up regularly or backing up anything more will probably be a pain.
I myself use a DLT 8000 drive for backups, but that’s a little highend for what you’re talking about. However, if you’re interested, the DLT 4000 drives are really cheap these days and would backup about 40gb of data. I don’t know if they make the drives new anymore, but the media is plentiful, and new 8000 tapes work just fine in the 4000 drives, just half the capacity. All you need is the following:
DLT 4000 Drive
SCSI card (AHA-2940UW Ultra-wide SCSI, or equivalent), and cables.
DLT tape(s)
Backup software.
It’s also compatible with Linux, Macs, and NAS.
If not… You could go with a DVD-Burner and save 4.7gb a disc.
To do a proper, full backup we’re talking about as much as 60Gb. I don’t do it often, not half as much as I should, but putting all that on CD-R is just not going to happen.
I had thought about just imaging a big spare external disk, dances, but reckoned it would be too expensive, and that would only give me a single, one generation backup. And I don’t have a fire safe.
I decided this year that the cheapest and easiest solution by far was to back up to a second disk. If you use imaging software which archives the image files, you could easily fit a pair of 60GB files on a 100GB disk, and just alternate every week or whatever.
I use bootit next generation from Terabyte software – for US$35, it’s a lifetime licenced, partition manager, boot manager, and imaging software. It’s the bargain of the century, and no mistake. I’ve got it set up to autobackup my system overnight once/wk in a rotating series of 3 image files.
I’d do a master backup to a removable hard-drive, then incrementals to CD or DVD, depending on how much you change in a day/ week. Then rent a safe box at your local bank to store them in.
I have been using my ADR OnStream USB 30GB tape drive with Echo software for nearly two years now and have been very happy with it. It was about $400 and $30/tape, IIRC. I do a full weekly backup and daily incrementals, rotating two tapes, and I also keep a spare third for emergencies. I have not had to do a full restore* yet (knock wood), but I have restored individual files successfully.
*When I’ve had to completely restore my drive, as for a major crash or transferring to a new machine, I do a clean install of all software and restore the data separately. Takes longer but I like having everything cleanly installed, and it’s also wonderful to have my entire drive backed up and not have to worry about whether I forgot something.
Is there any imaging software that can write to and recover from a USB or FireWire hard drive? An internal hard drive is not a safe place for a backup. There’s a good chance that whatever damages the primary drive will damage the backup drive as well (ligtning strike, virus, theft, etc).
Powerquest Drive Image claims to work with “virtually any internal or external hard drive.” Newer versions of Norton Ghost support USB drives, and some external CD burners.
For the OP, I’d recommend DVD-R or an external hard drive. At the last place I worked, we had a $300 DDS3 (or DDS4? I don’t remember) tape drive. Like the OP, we had about 60GB of data to backup. It would take the computer the better part of a fun, tape-swapping weekend to do that. Of course, our server had hundreds of thousands of tiny files, so it took longer than if it had only been a few hundred large files, but either way, still too long for my taste.
When we later got an external USB drive to do the backups, the difference was like night and day. It took a fraction of the time, and we never had to worry about swapping any stupid tapes. We also used a RAID 0 internal disk mirroring system for an extra layer of protection.
Remember that it costs as little as $100 for a 120GB external drive these days. If you’re eyeing tape drives, you should be able to afford two external drives, and then you’d have some redundancy to go along with your blazing fast speed. If you don’t have a fire safe, I’d guess that tape backups will burn up just as fast as hard drives in a fire, so I don’t see the advantage there.