Back up time, what to use?

[seind]

This could be off topic, but hey...

Should I use a tape back up device, or a second HDD on a RAID combination?
Not important information to back up, just for home use.
Any info on prices is also welcome

 

[Jeff H]

Have you considered a CD-RW drive? You can use a CD-RW disc like a giant floppy, via Windows Explorer, to back up approx. 550MB to a disc. And, anything that you want to archive can be burned to a CD-R. Plus, you then have a CD-RW drive to dup discs, make music CD's, etc.

 

[sohcrates]

you can get an external USB ZIP drive for like $129 these days (maybe less). they call it a "zip 250" cause it holds 250 megs on each disc.; the drive comes with 1 disc, and each new 250 disc costs like 13 bucks. not cheap by any means compared to burning cd's. zip's certainly are outdated, but if you're just backing up documents and stuff, it should be fine and cane be overwritten easily.

i'd also suggest a cd-rw if you are talking about backing up mp3's and larger stuff..but make sure your burner is newer, cause formatting / writing to cd-rw's on older burners is SLLLOOOOWWWW (at least with mine)

 

[Sugadaddy]

Get a program like Norton Ghost and a cd burner (or a second hard drive if you prefer). The burner is probably a better choice since it has other uses. Anyways, Ghost makes an Image of any partition you want, and has good compression so you won't need 30 cd's to burn the image.

 

[mindiris]

My perference is a fast CDRW drive (10x RW speed). Use DirectCD or some other similar program. Since a CDRW drive definately has far more uses than simply backup (burn backups to CDR, music,...), it is also more flexible.

A Plextor 12x10x32 drive should run about $250 tops.