Whats the cheapest and easiest way to backup around 100GB

[Byte]

Are there good tape drives that go that high? Also are there any imaging programs like Ghost or Drive image that lets you do this in Windows? I don't like rebooting to DOS to have to do this crap all the time. BTW external hard drives are stupid cuz i can just buy more internal ones, and hard drives tend to break for no reasons.

 

[GhettoFob]

pick up the 120 wd harddrive over in hot deals

 

[Staver]

HD will be the cheapest way to go. High-End tape drives that do 100GB will be very pricey. Drive Image has its own Dos image that boots itself so no floopies are involved. I'm afraid that files can not be in use to do what you want via image software. You could get a removal kit for a new HD and use it as removable backup media then backup to it via regular backup software like Retrospect, which has a free 30 day trial version.

 

[Need4Speed]

i'd have to agree...buy another drive. It's cheaper than buying high capacity tape backups and much faster as well. I regularly backup somehwere between 80-120gb as well, and origianlly I was going to get a nice tape backup, but the cost and capacity wsa very prohibitive. I went out and grabbed a couple of cheap 60gb drives and installed them in an old box that I plugged into the LAN...now I run backups every night to that PC...

 

[starwarsdad]

I have to say the same as the others. We use the 120 WD drives and back those up to 160 GB Firewire drives to take off-site.
Compared to other solutions I checked out this was the cheapest fastest thing to do.

 

[Muse]

I too say HD, and if you're hurting for IDE channels, get yourself an IDE controller card to give you four more - less than $40, and superior speed. If you have to take it offsite, it's still not that big a hassle to pull an internal drive out of the box and swap it with another once a week or whatever. I use Ghost and will never boot from another floppy if I can help it. I produced a CDR that is bootable and has Ghost.exe on it (very easily done - see the manual), and I can boot from that CDR and be in Ghost a ton faster than it takes to even boot Win2000. Ghost runs 5 times as fast from the CDR than it runs from the floppy, too. Make sure you have mouse support in Ghost, too, not a problem. To make things even more convenient, write yourself some batch files that automate your backup scenarios. I'm going to do that, and probably also run those from CDR or CDRW's. It won't launch the Ghost GUI from the autoexec.bat (as I'm doing now) but will either run my Ghost backup (not the GUI but the backup process itself) from autoexec.bat, run another batch file from autoexec.bat or just send me to a command line where I can run whatever batch file I want, either from the CDR or from one of my HDs. That way, you don't have to go through all the motions in the Ghost GUI, which is wasted motion if you are just doing the same backup over and over again. It also eliminates the possibility of making a careless mistake, which could be very costly. Making your Ghost batch files is also all in the manual Ghost manual. I'm running Ghost 2001.

 

[HGC]

I had a tape drive fail during a critical restore, and had Drive Image fail to restore too. Now I have two backup HDs, one for weekly Drive Image and one for daily Retrospect.

 

[HJB417]

jeez, what do you people store?!?!

 

[starwarsdad]

I store a lot of MP3s and video at home. Here at the office we store image and post script files that are up to 2 GB each. We are also an ASP/ISP. So we have customer websites that are populated by hi-res images, logos, power point presentations, audio, and video clips.

I run backups daily here that are well over 500GB.

For a home user though, the big killer is digital video. I have every VHS tape I own on my machine along with all of my home movies of the kids. I have also put every CD my wife and I have on my machine(over 200 encoded at 320 kbps). It ads up quick!

 

[Daxxax]

I know this is off topic, but I was wondering why in the heck tape backup solutions are so expensive. I mean come on it's a tape drive for god sake!!! practically 70's technology. Who here wouldn't get a tape drive to run backups if the price was under 100 hundred. I know I would. Just think if PC's from Dell, Gateway and the like came with a CD-rom,Cd-r and a tape drive. I really believe people would buy them if like I said the price was decent. any idea's????