need a good, cheap backup solution

[duffman542]

I need a good, cheap backup solution. I have a growing collection of data (about 400GB currently) and I need to get some kind of backup for it. Anybody know of any good deals or anything for a quality backup device?

I've seen tape drives which run about 600 or so plus $10 per 40GB tape

I just saw on circuitcity's site, they have a new Iomega® REV? 35GB/90GB Internal Drive, which is only about 380 and stores up to 90GB per disk. But each disk costs you $60.

CDs and DVDs are much too small to back up that much data. And disk to disk backup can get to be a bit costly, but moreso because there isn't enough space in my system to hold that many hard drives.

I have an old compaq DLT 15/30 external SCSI drive, but that thing just plain sucks and is slower than anything and DLT tapes are expensive too.

anybody know of anything cheap that can store large amounts of data?

 

[fishstickz]

First: what is cheap for you?

My suggestion would to just get a large IDE HDD (in the 400 GB range), put it in an external enclosure (firewire or USB powered) and the ghost your HD images to this external drive. I think this might just be the least painful way of taking care of this problem. Here are two links that might help you:

400GB Barracuda

Kingwin External Enclosure

Thats under 300 bucks before shipping/tax. Just my suggestion.

Edit: I know you said disk-to-disk is expensive- but 300 dollars is cheaper than your first two suggestions.

 

[duffman542]

I would say under $500 would be cheap, and that would be including extra costs like for multiple tapes and such.

But what you said is good. I have been using an older version of Powerquest Imagecenter for certain things, but I know for that when it creates an image, its just a huge file and you can't see the data in it unless you restore the image, that's why I hadn't given it much thought. I was thinking more along the lines of a solution to backup things and be able to dynamically access it at any time. Do you know if newer versions of Ghost do that? Can you have incremental backups that update the image files and can you extract data out of the image file without restoring the whole thing? That still may be the best option though cause you can get around 50% compression to save a lot of space and fit it all on one drive.

 

[furballi]

Use Bootit NG to create a partition where you store these data. Then image that partition at maximum compression (40% size reduction). A DVD can store up to 4.5GB of data. If you have a decent PC, then you can write data at a speed of +1.1GB/min.

A quality Made in Japan Taiyo Yuden 4.5GB DVD+R media will cost you 40 cents per disc.

 

[TWills]

Have you considered a fistful of 1 to 2GB usb sticks? They are easy to hide, have a fair amount of storage space, and easy to transport...