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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?"
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.
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?
"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.
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.