After two bad harddrive losses, I think I’ve finally learned my lesson that I need to back up my files. I work with a lot of art files which total ~1GB. I’ve thought about register.com’s online backup service but it costs $250 annually for 1GB, which is pretty steep. Burning to a DVD is another option but it sounds like a hassle going through one blank DVD per backup. Any suggestions?
You could use Re-Writable DVDs, that way you would only need, for example, 5 of them. Once you have made 5 backups (say you do one per week) then on the 6th week you write over the 1st backup and so on. No need to keep buying extra DVDs and you always have backups going back several weeks.
I’ve heard that re-writtable DVDs have limited uses, or are “less good” after each reuse. Is that true?
I think you should go with an external hard drive with one button backup capability. Here is a ranking of them by PC World . A 200 gb model costs less than register.com for only a year.
Taken from www.dvdplusrw.org
So basically it shouldn’t be a problem
I would strongly incline against the entire spectrum of CD/CDR-W/DVD as storage media. How long do you wish your media to be readable? I ask because there is mounting evidence that this media Is Not Very Stable .
OTOH, this rather enlightening article on the Stability of CD’s today opposed to in the 1980’s presents a very persuasive argument for using today’s CD technology with confidence.
I don’t buy it. I have sitting next to my eMac right now a lovely little Smartdisk Firelite firewire hard drive. It’s powered by the machine. It’s small- 1/2 inch thick, 3 inches wide and 5 inches long. That’s it. It’s a 40 Gig HD. It is read by both Mac and Win XP machines in the house. In short, it is the confidence system in the house. Any large projects being done on any machine, is done with this external HD in place. It cost $ 150.00 USD and to me is well worth the price. Everything of value is stored on this machine. I can slip it into my shoulder bag and take an entire hard drive with me. I heartily recommend this approach to backup.
Cartooniverse
Symantec has a fantastic product called ghost, which allows you to make compressed images of a hard drive, and save those to re-writable DVD’s
Get a copy of ghost for $70 or so
Get a re-writeable USB DVD drive again $70 or so
Get a Hard Drive Enclosure, and mount the DVD drive inside the enclusure, $25 or so
Connect the thing with a USB cable to your computer, then you can backup and restore any system you want.
External hard drive (USB is fine if you’ve got the port available); partitioned in slices to match your internal drive if it’s partitioned (e.g., into C and D if you’re on a PC is a common OEM configuration). Use a backup software that will result in a bootable clone of your source drive, and back up the whole bloody works.
I recommend Retrospect Express. It’s never failed me and it’s cross-platform in case you ever get a Mac (or if you’re on a Mac and get a PC etc — you didn’t specify platform and you did say you had a lot of art files).
As long as your backups are current, it’s actually easier sometimes if you’re having a hosed-settings problem to switch boot devices to the backup and erase then reverse-backup (i.e., restore) than it is to troubleshoot and fix the problem.
So you have one gigabyte of files to back-up? My suggestion is to get a Gmail account (which provides 1 gig of space for free) and then to use the Gmail Drive Shell extension to let you treat the Gmail account as a harddrive. Simply set this up, and copy/paste your files into the drive, and let Google store them.
I just had a crash and paid DriveSavers over $2,000 to recover my data, so I now back up. I searched around and was steered to buying a hard drive and using a product called Personal Backup, from Intego. You can clone your entire system to it, or just your files, then update every day, week, or month with just one click. I am not very computer savvy and even I can do it pretty easily.
Good luck.
Something people overlook - you not only want to backup, you may want to keep a set of backups at a different physical location. Suppose your house burns down. External hard drive - if it isn’t even on removable media, what if a burglar walks off with your entire system? Companies with vital data always have contigency plans for possible physical catastrophes to their premises. You should too.
If you use removable media, periodically take a set of backups to your office, a relative’s house, your safe deposit box, or something like this. If you go the route of an online service, you get this for free, of course, but you may not wish to go this route for other reasons.
An external hard drive is good for incremental backups - ie, copies of stuff that you’ve been doing recently, but haven’t yet incorporated onto a full removable backup. The “cadillac” solution here is RAID, if you care to shell out for it and set it up.
In the past I’ve used tape drives - slow, and annoying. When zip drives came out, I used those for a while. Currently, I use CDs.
Long term CD stability may not be that much of an issue for backups - you keep replacing it with a fresh copy, anyway. I DO wonder about repeated rewrites of the media, and would suggest that CD disks be periodically replaced rather then being rewritten ad infinitim.
If you think through what you have on your disk, and only backup stuff that can’t be recovered from distributions, etc, you may be surprised at how little you really need to back up (depending on what you do - if you are a graphic artist, forget what I just said). It’s good discipline, anyway, to maintain your file structures so that you know where everything is, and separate your own updated data from applications managing it (I force my mailer to keep folders outside the installed directory structure, in a directory of my choosing, for instance). Cuts down on cruft, and makes it easier to examine data managed by an application externally if you want to. I think a lot of people who back up entire disk images have messes build up because they don’t organize their disks carefully.
(If you do devlopment in a compiled language like C or java, this is especially true - small source files generate class or object files, jars or libs/executables. The stuff you actually write is very small compared to the derived product. It relates to a pet peeve of mine with CM systems - people checking in derived files rather than sources. Not only does it bloat the archive, it leads to sloppy build procedures where people who should be doing complete, clean builds from source wind up not doing so.)
Given that, I’ve just written little shell scripts to do my backups. I used to zip them up and copy zips to my backup media. Now I just copy directories whole to the CD.
Another vote for external hard drive. I take mine out once a month, drag-and-drop everything to it, let it run overnight while I sleep, then lock it back up. No muss, no fuss.
DVD+RW discs cost around $0.50-$1.00 each. If you want to go that way, re-use the M-Sat DVD each week for one year and use a new disc for a weekly backup that never gets overwritten (or that you only rewrite every few months, so you have some long-term recovery capability) then you’re only talking about $50 or $60 worth of media each year, pretty cheap for peace of mind.
Depending on how paranoid you want to be you can use a two-tiered approach, such as:
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Get an external USB/FW harddrive and clone the critical data to it each day (so if your machine dies in the middle of the day you have a hot copy onhand).
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Daily backup to DVD. Re-use the daily disc each week (so you have a “Monday” DVD, “Tuesday” DVD and so on). On Sunday make a backup that never gets re-used (so you can always go back a few months to recover old data). At the end of the year replace the daily discs if you are worried about how many rewrite cycles they can handle.
There’s two things you want to take care of; the routine “oops I shouldn’t have deleted that” problem, which doesn’t really require long-term storage and needs to be very convenient (that’s your external hard drive) and the major disaster (hard drive dies, house burns down, PC gets stolen, etc) where you are pretty much going to have to rebuild from scratch.
As others have stated, it is critical to keep your backups at another secure physical location - store the weekly DVD in a file cabinet at work for example.
Sorry, a couple of other thoughts - since you say you’re only dealing with about 1GB of data total, even the cheapest hard drive you can find in any computer store will have plenty of space for multiple copies of that data (so you can keep, say, a few months of daily backups on that one drive, in seperate folders. Handy reference).
The other thing that could be useful is a little USB thumb drive. No moving parts, fairly inexpensive (you can get a 1GB model for under $100) and you can put it in your pocket and take it with you when you leave the house. Not a long-term storage mechanism but a handy one for that first level of protection.
The house burning down or theft of hardware thing didn’t really occur to me to be honest. Man… I suppose that I’d want to back up the core stuff- that’s a few Gig. The music and photos, feh- I’ll live. It’s the data and files and whatnots.
I suppose a few USB sticks are a good investment, tossed into a shielded bag and left in the safe depost box.
Or, under the hearthstone in the oaken strongbox with the brass hinghes where I keep my gold coins. 
You can get a small laptop hard drive and an external USB or Firewire box for it. Easy to pick up and move.
If you want some backup software I was playing with SyncBack today and it looks pretty good.
I use a ring backup method I learned from the sysadmin at work. Machine A backs up to space on B, B backs up to C, and so on until the last one backs up to A. This is done with nothing more than batch files with the xcopy command scheduled to go off nightly. All my data is in at least two places so I avoid the “I shouldn’t have deleted it” issue. If you’ve only got one machine you can do the same thing by adding a second drive and letting a script back up your files to it.
For the off-site stuff I’ve got a couple of spare hard drives, one attaches to the main computer in a USB adapter case and a script writes the most important files (everybody’s “My Documents” folders from the Windows machines, the global photo archive, emails, etc.) to it. Every time I make a trip to the safety deposit box I swap that drive with the one in the box. I could be a couple of months out of date if the house burns down but otherwise I’m pretty good.
The other thing to worry about is file formats. Sure you may still have your old files but can anything read your DeScribe 1.0 documents? For things you want to archive stick to nonproprietary formats (.rtf instead of .doc) and nothing beats plain text for files where formating doesn’t matter.
A DVD writer is a pretty good choice. Just keep your backups in darkness.