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Best Home Backup Strategy Now?
jollyreaper writes "Technology moves quickly and what was conventional wisdom last year can be folly this year. But the one thing that's remained constant is hard drives are far too large to backup via conventional means. Tape is expensive and can be unreliable, though it certainly has its proponents. DVDs are just too small. There are prosumer devices like the Drobo, but it's still just a giant box of hard drives, basically RAID. And as we've all had drilled into our heads, 'RAID is not backup.' When last this topic came up on Slashdot, the consensus was that hard drives were the best way to backup hard drives. Backup your internal HDD to an external one, and if your data is really important, have two externals and swap one off-site once a week. Is there any better advice these days?"
rsync.
That's the protocol. Now what media do you recommend? Another hard drive?
Thank for reading to the sig. You may stop reading now. It is safe. There is no more content. Why are you still reading?
Not really, keep doing it like that. for how to do that read this: http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html
I'm kinda a 'option 1' guy, but stuff that's really important, I just burn on to DVD every so often.
The other option, now that most folk now have halfdecent connections is to set up an rsync to a buddies machine, (and reciprocate) , using encryption, you now have an automatic off site back up.
Just because the backup solution _uses_ RAID doesn't mean the old adage applies to it. As long as you are using it as external backups all is well.
What that phrase IS telling you to do however is not use RAID on the machine you want to back up and expect it to do what you want.
My UID is prime... is yours?
Are you joking? S3 is perhaps the most overpriced way to backup data.
You're paying at least $0.15/GB/month for the space, and then paying $0.10/GB transferred in and $0.17/GB transferred out.
So if you were to use 1TB of storage over 5 years filling it perhaps 3 times over that period and reading it 10x, it would cost $1800 for the space alone, $300 bw in, $1700 bw out, for a total price of $3800.
Meanwhile, you can get 1TB hard drives for $80 everyday (you could almost buy 50 of them for the price of your online service). I'd love to hear how you can twist the math around so badly that it looks like you're actually saving money! Ever considered a career in politics?
Except its also a-ok on Mac OS X. I use it to backup my home mac server just fine. It appears to use some hack based on rdiff-backup.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
A flash drive is probably the most stable technology. The drawback is the high expense. My strategy is several fold:
- Nearly all my home movies are recorded on Super VHS tape. Being analog if the tape gets damaged, it will still be watchable (wrinkles appear as momentary scanlines).
- My downloaded porn is backed-up on an external USB drive. If the c: drives fails, I can just copy the stuff over (and vice-versa).
- Stuff that I can buy on DVD or CD like Babylon 5 or Star Trek, I buy. These discs are physically pressed with pits so they won't self-erase themselves like DVD-Rs or CD-Rs tend to do. They should last the rest of my life.
Unfortunately none of these strategies protect my from a major accident like a house fire. I just need to make sure not to do something stupid like fall asleep with a cigarette in my mouth.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
fine. add $150 for a blu ray burner. gee...wasnt that expensive ?
Now you're up to $550. For that, you could get a whole nother PC w/ 2 ea 1TB drives. Doesn't have to be even vaguely fast, just enough to host the drives. Access time to the entire backup is as fast as booting it, instead of digging through a stack of 40/50/60 disks.
I hate to be that bitter old pessimist, but this has been debated to death and back here on Slashdot many times over. I swear, it should be in the FAQ by now.
All of the times this question has come up (feels like at least once a month), there have been many very good suggestions. Why should we rehash them for the nth time?
Your average slashdotter is not going to get a cheapy $550 computer. Your average Joe maybe, and then they will complain to us that their computer is so slow...
"What about the other 95%?" Over the years I became an old and bitter sysadm... you know what ? They just need to do what the 5% did: Put their asses in a chair and Read The Fucking Manual... and read again, and again until they understand the subject.
That's not what they did.
First, they were born/nurtured in such a way to have above average technical aptitude.
Second, they were interested enough in how computers work to tinker and learn and gain a broad base of knowledge about their computer and OS.
Only then did they "put their asses in a chair and Read The Fucking Manual... and read again, and again until they understand the subject."
If you expect the 95% who did not go through the first two parts to skip right over into the third part, you're in dire need of taking your ass out of the chair and meeting some Real Fucking People.
No, I'm not user friendly, I do not need to be... people are asking me for help anyway.
Do what I do. Tell them, "yes, there's a way but it's rather complex. Do you want me to explain it?" The answer is almost always "no". Because they really don't want you to explain it, they want you to do it. If they say yes, you'll probably be asked to stop in less than 60 seconds.
Sure, it'll take a while to upload your initial 2TB
His service is capped at 100 GB a month.
Uploading 2 TB would take the better part of two years - assuming 100% of his traffic was dedicated to the process.
It would be simpler and cheaper to use a courier service.
They should use Time Machine.
Exactly! When it comes down to it the really important stuff I have could be backed up on paper tape. My resume, my tax returns and some other odds and bits. I use to try to save all sorts of crap, tried to "download the Internet." Ya know, I never looked at it again. Once in a while I'll find an old drive in a drawer, mount it up and then wonder why I was saving all my killer CGI scripts from '96. (Most of those "send a comment" scripts today would be called a spam-proxy :)
If the stuff is that important then that is what hard-copy and fire safes are for.
Rule one: If you got it from bit-torrent, then you don't need to archive it. If it ever was on TV, it will be again. If it's porn, there is lots more where that came from.
Rule two: If it's for work, then ask your boss how she wants it backed-up. Then you're covered.
Rule three: If it's 3 TB of video of the first year of your kid's life then edit it down to 5 minutes because that's all that anyone will watch (willingly) anyway.
Rule four: If it's killer code then tar-zip-gmail is your friend. Ask some other project if you can stash a copy on their CVS server.
Rule five: five-nines of everything is crap. Live now, not in the past.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
And honestly I'm not all that worried about backing up with modern operating systems.
Modern operating systems don't protect you from:
Best thing at the moment for home backup is to mount an encrypted external hard drive and copy to it, then take it off-site. If you think that sounds over the top, then I predict one day you'll be sitting at your terminal saying "aw, shit".
Advice: on VPS providers