> My backup problem may affect few today, but I think that it will become > more common as hard drives expand their capacity and people use their > computer in greater ways. At present, I think that very large SATA > hard > drives of 1 Terrabyte (does Windows XP support these?) or BluRay disks > are the only options for large data size backups. Are there other > options?
Yes. Online backup. Backing up a terabyte the first time would take a loooooong time, possibly a week and possibly violate your ISP terms of service, but it's worth looking into. After the first full backup, you only need incremental backups to keep it current. I like online backup as the data is always offsite and you can usually automate it. The downside is that it would also take a long time to restore that much data. Having a couple of 1 TB external drives acting as a backup medium gives you redundancy and leaves the online backup just for disaster recovery. There are multi-terabyte systems available. They tend to lag behind the single drives in terms of internal capacity. Last year, 1-2 TB devices were common, using 2-4 500 GB drives in a JBOD config. I suspect that 4 TB devices will replace them this year. I've recommended Mozy in the past, but that may be even too much for them. There are business options which may suit you better. And yes, XP using NTFS, supports a maximum of a 2 TB *partition*. In theory, it can support volumes up to 16 Exabytes (an Exabyte is 1,000,000 terabytes). Your computer hardware is the true determinate of how large a drive your system will support. ************************************************************************ * ==> QUICK LIST-COMMAND REFERENCE - Put the following commands in <== * ==> the body of an email & send 'em to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <== * Join the list: SUBSCRIBE COMPUTERGUYS-L Your Name * Too much mail? Try Daily Digests command: SET COMPUTERGUYS-L DIGEST * Tired of the List? Unsubscribe command: SIGNOFF COMPUTERGUYS-L * New address? From OLD address send: CHANGE COMPUTERGUYS-L YourNewAddress * Need more help? Send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ************************************************************************ * List archive from 1/1/2000 is on the MARC http://marc.info/?l=computerguys-l * List archive at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ * RSS at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml * Messages bearing the header "X-No-Archive: yes" will not be archived ************************************************************************
