I think the choice of backup media depends on what sort of back-up you're doing. I distinguish between:
-system backups - you're backing up a whole partition or drive, so you can quickly restore everything in the case of a hard drive failure, or if Windows blows up.
-data backups - for most people, this will be a much smaller backup, unless you have a lot of music, graphics, video, etc. to back up.
For the system backups, using a external hard drive like Brian describes makes a lot of sense to me. I do something similar, by creating drive images, and moving them across the network to store them on a different computer. I try to make them every few months, or whenever I make a significant hardware or software change. Since I have a separate data backup, I'm not worried about moving these off-site. If the house burns down, they won't be useful anyway.
For the data backups, I backup up everything to the hard drive daily, and once a week burn it to a CD-R, which I store off-site. My network data backup fits on a single CD as a zip file.
CD's and Zip disks each have their own pros and cons. CD-R's are much cheaper - 10 cents/disk if you watch for sales, compared to $100 for an 8-pack of Zip 750 disks. I've given up on CD-RW's, at least for the time being - they seem to get flaky at inconvenient moments. The low cost means you can make a new backup each time and save the old one -- this is a tremendous help when you discover that your database got corrupted 4 backups ago, and you need to go back a month to recover a good version (this has happened to several HelpNet members). Despite what Iomega says, everything else I've seen says that CD-R's last a lot longer than magnetic media, plus they're much less fragile.
The big disadvantage of CD-R, versus Zip, is that they're harder to use. Windows treats Zip drives like just another drive, so you can manipulate files the same way as you do on the hard drive. And if your backup takes more than one Zip disk, the Windows backup program will span disks. Backing up to CD with Windows Backup is a 2-step process -- you have to first backup to hard drive, then copy the file to CD -- and you can't span CD's. There is a good 3rd party program (BackupMyPC, $80 from www.stomp.com), which will write directly to CD, and will span CD's if you need more than one.
JOn
At 10:29 PM 11/13/2002 -0500, you wrote:
Hi All,Jonathan Falk
My current favorite backup system is a USB 2.0 external harddrive.
I do incremental backups every day and a full backup once a week. My full backup (of my data files and system state) take 28 GB so it's really not feasible for CD-R's.
Right now you can get a 60 GB drive for $166 on Buy.com. It installs in seconds and takes a lot of the chore out of backup. I know despite my best intentions I rarely took the time do backups before getting this drive. Now at least I can sleep better at night.
I'm considering getting another drive and keeping one "off-site" to take care of the disaster-by-fire scenario.
One note, most computers don't support USB 2.0. So unless you've got a fairly recent motherboard you should plan on spending another $40 or so on a USB 2.0 card. The drive will work with USB 1.1 but it's painfully slow. However if you are backing up overnight this might not be an issue. It think it took me about 10 hours or so to do the backup over USB 1.1 and about 1.5 hours using USB 2.0.
BTW, I've also seen external harddrive "shells" that you can just plug your own drive into.
Brian Rahill
Pine Tree Folk School
RR 2, Box 7162
Carmel, ME 04419
(207)848-2433
<http://www.ptfolkschool.org>
**Folkschool-list archives are at:
<http://www.mint.net/folkschool/helpnet/archives.htm>
Sponsored by Pine Tree Folk School
==^================================================================
This email was sent to: [email protected]
EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84vzQ.a9gqS3.YXJjaGl2
Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail!
http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register
==^================================================================
