Most Reliable Backup Method?

[3xVicious]

Hey Tech-Savvy People!

I was wondering what is considered to be the most reliable method of backing up files? I have around 500GB of Media ranging from Music, Videos, and Documents, and I currently put them on my old bulky 500GB My Book Essential External Hard Drive...

Now I've been taking care of it pretty well, I always have it disconnected from the Computer and the Power and only connect it for a quick back up, but I'm terrified of losing years of work and hundreds of dollars worth of media. I've used everything from Floppies, CDs, DVDs, and Blue-Rays. Now I need to replace my External HD with a bigger one since its pretty much full now. Should I stick to Western Digital? Specifically their My Passport Essential 1TB, or should I look into an Enclosure and Internal HD?

I've never used an Enclosure before either, so if I go with that option do I need a specific HD or would a Samsung Spinpoint F3 do? Is there a more reliable Hard Drive out there? I don't really want to spend more then $150 all together, and I was looking at getting a Rosewill RX-358-S BLK (Black) 3.5" SATA to USB & eSATA Ext. Enclosure and a Samsung Spinpoint, since my old External Hard Drive was notoriously slow.

 

[RhoXS]

Here is what I do.

For years I simply make a true plug and play clone of my primary drive on a regular basis. On a couple of occassions over the past ten years, having a recent clone sitting on the shelf that just needed to be pluged in, averted a catastrophe in literally just minutes.

I bought a removable drive drawer that mounts into a 5.25" external bay. See the Startech product for $35.00 from Newegg. I also bought an extra drive carrier (about 15$ each) so I have two drives to alternate. Every couple of weeks I clone the primary drive and then set the drawer on a shelf out of harms way. The next time I use the other drive so I am not overwriting the most recent clone. EASEUS Disk Copy is an excellent product that boots from a CD and is free.

When I installed an SSD over a year ago things got a little more complicated as now everything was not stored on a single drive. I still make clones of my primary SSD but I now also have to back up the precious data on the big secondary HDD. I just bought two more HDD carriers and simply use Windows Explorer to copy the folders with the data to the removable backup drives. EASEUS also has a free product, that must be installed under Windows, that will automate this task.

One important point. Make sure the removable drives are a different size than the installed drives. That way there is no question when you make the clone/backup what is the source drive and what is the destination drive. Obviously, inadvertently mixing these up would ruin your day.

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

Norton ghost hdd image on a external. Kee p it somewhere save unless a tornado takes your home away.

Raid is not a way to back up data.

 

[3xVicious]

I bought a removable drive drawer that mounts into a 5.25" external bay. See the Startech product for $35.00 from Newegg. I also bought an extra drive carrier (about 15$ each) so I have two drives to alternate. Every couple of weeks I clone the primary drive and then set the drawer on a shelf out of harms way. The next time I use the other drive so I am not overwriting the most recent clone. EASEUS Disk Copy is an excellent product that boots from a CD and is free.

I'm still a bit confused here... I'm assuming a Removable Drive Drawer is that same as the Rosewill RX-358 I linked? An external enclosure? So all I would need to do is take any old Internal Hard Drive, put it in a enclosure, and then make a backup using Ghost for the most reliable results? Or should I just buy an External Hard Drive like the passport I mentioned earlier and use Norton Ghost in conjunction with that?

I'd appreciate any extra clarification on this, I currently backup everything on a hard drive and then back up my most sensitive files on a DVD every week or so, its tedious and very time consuming.

 

[Blain]

Most Reliable Backup Method?

I'm terrified of losing years of work and hundreds of dollars worth of media.

* A quality eSATA or USB 3.0 enclosure with a good enterprise class HD (Samsung F3R or WD Black)
* Rinse & Repeat
* Anual Blu-Ray archiving using high quality media and burner.

You don't need to ghost anything unless you want to clone the whole drive, which you don't, since you're concerned about "Music, Videos, and Documents".
A hot swap bay is nice, but in my estimation moving bare drives around isn't a good practice for reliability.
Just invest in good quality external enclosures fitted with enterprise class HDs and have dualing backups.

 

[RhoXS]

I'm still a bit confused here... I'm assuming a Removable Drive Drawer is that same as the Rosewill RX-358 I linked? An external enclosure? So all I would need to do is take any old Internal Hard Drive, put it in a enclosure, and then make a backup using Ghost for the most reliable results? Or should I just buy an External Hard Drive like the passport I mentioned earlier and use Norton Ghost in conjunction with that?

I'd appreciate any extra clarification on this, I currently backup everything on a hard drive and then back up my most sensitive files on a DVD every week or so, its tedious and very time consuming.

From a big picture, I temporarily connect a HDD to a SATA port and power, run the software, clone the installed primary drive, disconnect the temporary drive, and store it safely on a shelf somewhere.

I do not want to take the cover off the case everytime I do this to get to the mobo so I can connect the drive. Instead, I installed a "drawer" in a spare 5.25 inch external bay. An enclosed carrier or caddy with an HDD installed in it slides and locks into this drawer. I use two caddies, one for each of the two backup drives.

In other words, everytime I want to make a clone or backup, I simply take the caddy with the drive I want to use and just slide it in place.

The drawer with one caddy I think is StarTech DRW150SATBK ($46 Newegg) and extra caddies are StarTech 150CADSBK ($27 Newegg).

I used to use Ghost 2003. It is DOS based and will boot off a floppy or USB memory device. Ghost 2003 is an outstanding piece of software in my opinion because it is so elegantly simple. Ghost 2003 does not work as well with W7 so I switched to EASEUS Disk Copy. The EASEUS product reminds me of Ghost 2003 only with a much improved and friendlier interface.

 

[corkyg]

In my view, reliability is achieved through "planned redundancy" By that I mean duplicate HDDs, externals, optical disks, etc. I won't get into what software to use - whatever works best for you. That's a personal choice.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

OK no one is addressing an important aspect of a complete backup scheme. OFF SITE STORAGE.
For my data I have a seperate machine on the network that clones everything on my main computer every sunday night. It then duplicates this to an external 2TB drive. Monday I bring that with me to work and keep it locked in my desk drawer.

If you have important files in your backup, what are you going to do when your backup medium is destroyed in a fire at your house?

 

[wayliff]

I think the mod gave you some wise advice.
Everyone else has also provided great advice.

My system is made of 1 x 640GB (applications \ downloads) and 1 x 1TB (Documents, Pictures, Media, Other Data) Hard drives.
I have an external 1 x 1TB Hard Drive where I do backups of the other two drives at intervals.
In addition, I also have the contents of the data drive backed up to the cloud using Backblaze, $50/year unlimited data.

I should have an extra external HD for redundancy but I can't put in place right now. Eventually when I outgrow its size, I may install setup a 2 x 2TB HDs in RAID1.

Just remember RAID is for data redundancy and it is not a backup solution.
Like people mention a combination of strategies should work best.

Good luck.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Hey Tech-Savvy People!

I was wondering what is considered to be the most reliable method of backing up files? I have around 500GB of Media ranging from Music, Videos, and Documents, and I currently put them on my old bulky 500GB My Book Essential External Hard Drive...

Now I've been taking care of it pretty well, I always have it disconnected from the Computer and the Power and only connect it for a quick back up, but I'm terrified of losing years of work and hundreds of dollars worth of media. I've used everything from Floppies, CDs, DVDs, and Blue-Rays. Now I need to replace my External HD with a bigger one since its pretty much full now. Should I stick to Western Digital? Specifically their My Passport Essential 1TB, or should I look into an Enclosure and Internal HD?

Do you have two copies of that data, one on your internal HD, and one on the external? Because if you don't, then that's not backup. "Backup" is TWO OR MORE copies of your data, preferably stored in different places.

 

[jimhsu]

Do you have two copies of that data, one on your internal HD, and one on the external? Because if you don't, then that's not backup. "Backup" is TWO OR MORE copies of your data, preferably stored in different places.

Personally, I think offsite backup is necessary. For my most important documents, I have a copy locally, another copy on a local internal hard drive, another copy on a server in Atlanta, GA with my VPN host, and YET another copy in a bank vault in Minnesota (Crashplan). All this is managed by SVN so that I get protection across both time and space (e.g. accidentally deleting something made an year ago, or finding that some old file is corrupted). That in turn is MD5 hashed and sent to Gmail, so I can track any bit error corruption across time.

It's obviously impractical to back up ALL my files this way, so I triage my backup set into a) most important, b) important, and c) replaceable.

Geographical offsite is crucial, especially since I live somewhere where a disaster is quite likely (Houston, with hurricanes and all).