Affordable Home Backups for 10-100G Systems?

MichaelJames asks: "Ok, I have my MP3's streaming, all our digital pictures up, and a file server running on one machine in the basement. What would be the best way to do simple backups of the system and data? Get a tape drive Get a CDRW or DVDRW to backup the MP3 and pics, but use the old Zip drive for the file server data?" With drives in the 10-20 gig range only getting smaller and less expensive, what are we to do for backups, that have yet to scale well in the same range. For home systems with up to 100G of storage, what do you use to back up that much data, with a solution that's affordable to the average computer user? Have DVD writers become cheap enough for serious consideration as a backup media?

Comments

Hard Drives

[Tackhead]

> For home systems with up to 100G of storage, what do you use to back up that much data, with a solution that's affordable to the average computer user?

Given that a 100G hard drive is cheaper than any removable media solution, why not just buy another hard drive and install it in a removable (not hot-swappable, just removable) rack?

Racks are $20 at my local Fry's, and inserts for other hard drives are $10.

The question I have to ask...

[weslocke]

I have to say that this is coming from someone with a total of around 280gig at the house, but...

Out of 100gig, how much do you really NEED to back up?

The vast majority of my space is taken up by MP3s (where I converted my CD collection), but that could easily be replaced. To tell you the truth, of the things that I would need (documents, pictures, etc), I could easily fit it all onto a CDR. Well, maybe two. (I take lots of pictures)

Basically it boils down to, do you really need to shell out the money for that extra drive?

:^)

Why bother?

[crow]

Why are you bothering to back up your data?

That may seem like a stupid question, but you need to consider the reasons you want to have a backup before you settle on a method.

Are you afraid of your drive failing? If so, then using a RAID solution should cover you.

Are you afraid of losing your whole system (perhaps due to lightning or theft)? If so, then your backup must be kept physically isolated from your system.

Are you afraid of accidentally deleting files (such as `rm -rf /` or a virus)? If so, then a RAID solution is useless.

Are you afraid of having your system down for an hour or two while you replace a drive? If so, then regardless of other issues, you need a RAID setup.

Do you want to use your MP3s with some other device? If so, you probably want CD-R copies.

Of course, there are other considerations that I haven't mentioned or thought of.

/home/dir

[xant]

This is where Unix's concept and implementation of HOME directory really shines. In the Windows paradigm, things can and do end up anywhere on the system, because you can write anywhere you want to. Application software is under no pressure to write to a standard place so you end up with things in: the desktop, the application's home directory, the user's home directory (if you're in win2k or later), a temp directory, etc. In Unix users have 2 places to write things: $HOME, and /tmp. If you don't want to keep a file around later, just remember not to put it in tmp. Then only back up $HOME. Everything else on your system can be restored automatically from either the net or the CD media that you purchased.

Not to distro-bait, but Debian in particular shines here because apt makes it so damn easy to bring a system back to the state you wanted. For myself I have created a meta-package (.deb) which does nothing but depend on the applications I want installed on every desktop system: galeon, gnucash, xchat, gaim, xmms, vim-gtk, and a handful of others. Then I back up my meta-package, all of 10k including a few shell scripts I wrote for myself. Install my meta-package on a new system, and voilá, apt fetches and installs every app, that I need to continue working, dependencies included.

Hey old-timer...

[plastik55]

Back in the day, you would actually buy software packages dedicated to doing backup. And they all did s thing called "incremental backup." That meant that they kept a database of all the files on your disk, and they would only copy the files which had changed since your last backup.

That worked really well for backing up our 80MB drives onto stacks of 1.44MB floppies, since you would really only need to insert about 5-10 floppies during your weekly backup, just to get the files that changed.

So why not just do incremental backup onto CD-Rs? Even with 100GB of archives, most of those are static. You probably won't need to use more than one CDR per week (maybe two) to track the changes. It's cheap, relatively painless if you've got the right software (and it wouldn't be hard to throw together incremental backup/recovery scripts in Perl if you're into that sort of thing.) and you've probably already got a CD burner.

If less than 650MB of files change in a week, the rest of the CDR can be filled up with files that were on earlier CDRs (this way your backup set can remain finite and you can throw out the earlier CDRs as they become obsolete. Or if you keep them all, you can reconstruct that state of your hard drive at *any* time, not just at the last backup.) This seems ideal to me--why is everyone else talking about expensive solutions like tape drives, DVD-RWs, and second hard drives?