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Affordable Home Backups for 10-100G Systems?

Posted by Cliff on from the portable-media-that-can-store-GIGs dept.

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?

6 of 690 comments (clear)

  1. Cheapest way might be another hard drive... by ncc74656 · · Score: 1, Redundant
    It's been said before, but tape drives are still fairly small compared to current hard drives unless you want to spend thousands for DLT or something similar. With 100GB+ hard drives around $300 or so, you might just want to throw a drive rack and a removable HD in for backup.

    One more thing...First Post! :-)

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  2. More Drives by Liquid(TJ) · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Seems to me that, anymore, the only cheap solution that's got any speed to it is more hard drives. OF course, if you're looking to do weekly's or something then it's no fun changing out a whole drive for it every week, but then it's not THAT much work either...

  3. raid by geekoid · · Score: 1, Redundant

    since drive are so cheap, maybe systems should start coming with a standard raid set up?
    also you can by many tape solutions.

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  4. Hard Drive != Long Term Backup by Christopher+Bibbs · · Score: 2, Redundant

    This is really only a short term backup. Since the storage media and the reader are one unit, if either fails the back up is toast. If you have two drives, you might as well setup mirrored RAID.

    Real backup is done on semipermanent media (>10 year storage) in a format that can be taken off site easily.

  5. Re:Hard Drives by Uruk · · Score: 2, Redundant

    One of the reasons that hard drives are lousy back up medium is because they don't address some of the needs of serious backup systems.

    Sure if it's removable then you're probably mostly OK, but if some power accident fries your box, and your backup hard drive is in there, oh well.

    Another principle of good backups is to have another copy in another location, since having an extra hard drive won't help you if your house burns down.

    For average users, I think the only real solution to backups is going to come when network storage is dirt cheap and bandwidth is just as cheap. God how I'd love to backup my data with one entry in a crontab:

    0 * * * * scp -r / myaccount@bigcheapstorage.com:/home/myaccount

    (Using the SSH keysystem to avoid entering passwords, of course) :)

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  6. Re:Maybe it's not fancy, but... by smaug195 · · Score: 2, Redundant

    You sir, have wayyy too much free time on your hands.