Is a large harddrive a viable backup solution?

[Nebuchadnezzar 0]

So I've been doing this thing for a number of years. My dining room isn't really a dining room anymore, it's got this washed oak wrap around desk on the outside and on it sit 8 computers - 2 Windows 2000 Servers, 2 XP Pro Workstations, a PowerMac G3 B&W, my IBM ThinkPad from work, a 2000 Pro Workstation and an old Linux machine.

 

It's lucky my wife likes this stuff too.

 

Over the years I've collected an incredible amount of stuff (files and such). It occured to me the other day I don't really have a satisfactory backup plan. It would suck to lose all this stuff in some drive crash.

 

I do have a burner, but we're talking about *a lot* of stuff - I am looking for something at least in the multi-gigabyte category. I was looking at the prices of tape drives, and it just seems that gig for gig, buying a large harddrive, loading your data onto it and taking it offline and sitting it on a shelf somewhere until you need it again is more economical than investing in the tape drive and buying media for it. I do have those removable drive bays in one of the workstations so backups (although it would be a manual process) wouldn't be a huge deal.

 

How do you guys do it?

[DosFreak 2]

I looked into tape backup DDS2/3/4.

 

DDS 2/3 is too small and DDS/4 is too expensive/small/slow/requires another tape drive for what I need.

 

I have 44GB of stuff I work on and that I need to backup. Right now I am using 2 60GB IBM IDE DMA/100 drives for backup. The 1st drive I use for the files and the second I backup to using MSBACKUP once a month. Just started doing this yesterday (before used to backup to ALOT of CDR's). I then disconnect the power cord from the second hard drive until the next backup. It took me 3 hours to backup to the hard drive but it worked perfectly requiring no intervention on my part the way a DDS2/3 tape drive would require. Also since my files are already highly compressed anyway even with hardware compression a tape drive wouldn't do me any good anyway.

 

I would LOVE to be using SCSI/tape but I am an impatient person and also wasting that much money for backup just for me is insane.

[rayers2 0]

I use some external SCSI drives for my backups. I have 4 systems in the house and what I do is a ghost/network backup of the systems to the SCSI drives. Then after the backup I just shut the drives down untill the next backup or restore, Usually takes 10 mins or less to restore a system..

[Lactic.Acid 0]

A hard drive will work, yes. But do you want to use one? A tape drive is a chunk-o-change up front, but tapes are not all that expensive, and you can create more than one copy to do offsite backup (or large-scale file transfer with friends/associates, should you wish it). Plus, if someone just happens to walk by that shelf with a high-powered magnet...well, maybe not. But if it fell off the shelf? There goes your drive and all your backed-up data. With tapes, you'd be able to create chronological back-ups, like once a week and you move one set off-site once per month. My poor (read: can't afford a tape drive either) ***' My $0.02

/L.A

[Palos 0]

I wouldn't back up anything valuable on magnetic media, especially in Gigabyte sizes. Tape can also be an overkill...I would go digital insted: DVD-R (or whatever standards there are around it). Discs can hold 4.7 GB of data...maybe more in the future. I know you cannot compare it to a 60 GB HDD, but it's dustproof, magnetic&electric fluctuation proof, etc...

 

The lifetime of digital media is the keyword here. However if all depends on the cash you want to invest in it, and how badly you want to hang on to the data you got.

[pimpin_228 0]

but disks can be scratched and some of them discs are anywhere from 40-60 bucks too

[clutch 1]

My avg backup runs 40GB at work, and I don't have any problems restoring from tape. There used to be major issues with tape quite a while ago, but for the most part they are pretty reliable depending on the format. I use a 21 tape rotation as follows:

 

M-Th: 4 tapes

Fridays: 5 tapes

Last weekday of the month: 12 tapes

And then we rotate out a spare for the annual backup which isn't in the normal rotation, but is archived much longer.

 

Now, keeping 21 harddrives and restoring from them would be quite expensive and a *real* pain in the a$$...

 

[DosFreak 2]

Well, I was able to shuffle around some discs and finally forced myself to install the VIA 4-in-1 busmaster drivers. Got my second backup drive to DMA/66 instead of multi-word-DMA. Backup speed cut in half! Now it's 1hr 20mins to back up 44gb! WOOHOO!!!!!