How often to you back up, how, and why not? ;)

All new work saved to the hard drive during the course of the day,regardless of its "state of readiness" is saved before the computer goes to bed. I use CD-R's . I do this as I once experienced a catastrophic hard drive crash and lost a whole bunch of stuff which took about 2 weeks to redo. This way the most I can loose is 1 days stuff. Bad but not crippling. Tom

I just got a 250gig external USB2 hd and finished my first backup onto it. It feels good, a nice warm/fuzzy feeling :)

There was a $30 rebate, plus Amazon is running a special in their electronics section this month where any purchase over $250 gets you a $50 user credit back. So, the combined $80 made my mind up.

I like the idea of having a hd on a separate power supply, even on a different electrical circuit. It may only be an imaginary feeling of safety, but I'll take what I can get.

I had to reformat it first thing, since fat32 would only allow a backup size of 4gig, and that would never do. I can store over 4 complete images of my work hd on this thing, but I'm opting for traditional backup.

An IT friend of mine found a couple of HP DAT 24 tape drives in the scrap bin at work. He took them home and found they just needed the firmware re-installing and they worked fine. I've was given one of these and its used for twice weekly backups although I usually burn new stuff onto CDr.

Tape drives are great, cheap media, huge capacity. But my brother had one that the company stopped updating drivers for, then needed some of his backed-up data and couldn't get at it. No one made a compatible drive, and his only option was professional data retrival, and the estimate was $450 (he passed). I don't think this is as much an issue nowadays, since formats have pretty much standardized.

I was warned not to use consecutive tapes for a system back up as the 2K backup facility is considered poor. I just stick to blocks of data on one tape.

I'm also going to start archiving onto CDR to free up hd space. I didn't before because one project folder might be several gig, but I read that most backup software now includes CDR spanning as standard.

I'm only a few years behind the times :)

I was toying with the idea of an external DVD burner have you had any experience with the format. The Pioneer 105/6 models seem to be the devices of choice over here.

No personal experience, but I hear the format wars are coming to a close. Of course, format doesn't matter all that much when considering backing up data, just for burning movies. My only concern would be write speed. It may be very fast, but I haven't seen any data on it. I know that writing to CDRW can take 10x as long as to CDR.

Kind of late jumping in on this but have had a recent incident on my system. I am running a pair of 80 Gig drives mirrored and have a 60 Gig I use to store a Power Quest Drive image to. Well my backup drive, the 60 gig, just failed and I have lost the image backups I had stored on it.

So I am buying a DVD +RW drive so I can store the images on DVD so hopefully I wont lose these images again. The problem is that now I have lost the one image I really wanted to keep which was the one I made just after loading windows and after I had loaded all of the hardware drivers installed and working. Oh well I'll never need to reload Windows XP, right?

Sorry to jump in late, but I was just having this conversation with a friend. Here is what I sent to him regarding DVD:

You should definitely buy a DVD writer. Even the external ones can be had for $200 or less. You will wonder how you ever got by with CDRWs or (gack) zip disks. Even aside from the video considerations, being able to fit over 4G of data onto one disk itself is worth every penny.

Since you didn't ask, here are my recommendations (har!):

best unit: Sony DRU-500AX, writes/reads DVD+ and - R and RW, CDRW, etc
best media: Ritek DVD+RW for rewritables, Ritek DVD+R or -R for read-only*
where to buy hardware: I like http://www.mwave.com, fast, reliable, good prices
where to buy media: http://www.rima.com without question
best place to do research: http://www.dvdrhelp.com

* note that this is based on some coaster-making experience

I'm buying -R at about $1.12 each, and -RW at $1.80 each, not including shipping and tax. That's about 53 cents per gig if you do include shipping and tax.

I hope this helps someone. Then again, it will probably help someone develop an intense time-consuming hobby, like putting family home movies onto DVD with motion menus and such... yes, I speak from experience... but it's all retouching, isn't it? :)

Jeff

Thanks for the info Jeff. I did already buy the DVD, it's a Pioneer DVR-106D. It writes all the formats on DVD R & DVD RW. I am very happy with it so far.

Thanks for the links to the vendors. I have been looking at media and was having problems deciding which brand was safe to go with. Maybe soon the media cost will come down. Right now it is still a little pricey. You don't just walk up to the counter and say give me that 100 spindle of DVD +R.

Jeff, I am in the market for a dvd burner. I will more then likely go with Sony as I have had good luck with their products. My question is do the dvd+rw seem reliable? I know there have been problems with cd-rw's. It would be nice to be able to rewrite to dvd's. Thanks.

Bob

One of the main reasons I haven't gotten a DVD burner yet is that I wonder if there is going to be some sort of "shake-out" where one format (+ or - R) is going to become the "standard" and all newer drives will support only that standard. If I happen to choose the "wrong" one to save my images on then I'll be out of luck.

Is this really an issue or is it my imagination?

Also, is one format better for archiving data than another? I read somewhere (don't ask me where) that DVD-ROM is best for archiving data, yet I don't even see the format mentioned in any current burners/media.

I just recently bought an external hard drive for backing up (only) b/c it just takes toooooo long to back up 60gig to CDs!!

Jeanie

Jeanie, a lot of the newer DVD burners out there, like the one I bought, support all the different formats. I think that the +R & +RW formats will win out but until then I can do all of them.

The new DVD burners out now support write speeds of 4X on DVD R and 2.4X on DVD RW. Don't let this fool you into thinking in terms of CD burn times. I can burn a 4.6 Gig DVD R in about 12 minutes at 2X. I haven't bought any 4X DVD +R blanks so I don't have a time at this speed. These are very respectable speeds for creating data backups.

Your idea of the portable hard drive is a good one. I've been think along those lines lately myself. My backup hard drive, which was an internal drive, failed. I was storing my Power Quest image backups on that drive because they were too big to fit on a CD. I hope to do the same thing using DVD's this time. I lost the most important image backup which was the one I made just after loading all the software and hardware on the primary XP machine. Hard drives can fail in the blink of an eye with no warning.

Kevin, have you used any of the dvd-rw media yet? For what I do it would be nice to add to a dvd instead of having to burn new ones after one session.

Bob

Kevin, I know all to well that HDs can fail quickly and without warning. I use my external drive to backup what is on my main hard drives, so I always have duplicate copies. I never have just a single copy of anything that I don't want to lose on a hard drive. If I clean something off of my main drive, I copy it to a CD (often times two CDs depending on how important the data is to me, since CDs can fail too). I don't rely on the external drive to keep the only copy of files that I've removed from my main drive.

Do you know if you can write multiple sessions to DVD-R/+R media like you can with CDRs? Unless I'm doing a major backup, I don't usually have 4+ gigs of data from a project that I've finished and want to backup. Seems a waste to use DVD-R/+R media for just 1.4 gigs of data when I could copy it to two CDRs. Or would you still just copy that amount of data to CDRs and leave the DVD backups to larger amounts of data?

Jeanie

Hey Bob. Yes I have 3 of the DVD-RW disks in use now. They work very well. I use Roxio 6.0 and it supports "drag & Drop" to DVD-RW. I plan on using them like removable hard drives. When I am finished with a project I will move the files to DVD+R for permanent storage. I also plan on continue to use CDROM disks for permanent storage as well. Expecially the smaller projects they are so cheap, and I have a couple of hundred of them I need to use.

Jeanie, yes you can have multiple sessions of the DVD R media. There is that gap in the medai though, 1.4 Gig is too much to consider CDs and too small to use DVD. I use the CDs only if the project I am storing is smaller than 650 Meg. I put them on the DVD for the larger ones and will store multiple projects on one disk.

I still haven't bought a image managment program. I'm still torn between Imatch and Adobe Photo Album. I have to choose soon because I need to get this project out of the way so I can move on and not have to worry where my files are anymore.

Thanks for the info Kevin.

Out of curiosity, how fast is it to retrieve files from DVDs vs. CDs? Some things I hate to put on CD just b/c it takes so much longer to retrieve than from a hard drive. (Or I might backup to CD, but still keep it on the hard drive. Then I can never remember what I've backed up to CD and what I haven't. :( ) Not that I access those files all that often, but when I do I'm usually in a rush. :(

Jeanie

Jeanie I'm glad you asked that question. I haven't tried to retrieve any files yet. Of course this is just for illustration purposes because it isn't very scientific, on my PC I opened the Photoshop "File Open" menu and selected a file on my harddrive, a 20Meg Tif file, and it took about 1 1/2 seconds to fully retrieve the file. I then went to the DVD and opened the same file in the same manner and it took about 20 seconds. So it is significantly slower on the DVD than on the hard drive.

The backing up question has yet to be solved here either. That is why I am looking into an image managment program. I just haven't decided on what to buy yet. Or maybe I need just a backup program to automatically keep my picture files backed up. Doing manual backups usually means that I might not do them in a timely manner. Like right now I bet that I have files on my hard drive that aren't backed up properly.

Recently had a HD crash, and got into backing up in a big way.

I decided to go with a product called BACKUP NOW 3, details can be found at:

http://www.ntius.com/default.asp

This allows me to do either an image backup of an entire disk/partition, or selected files/folders. I created a folder called data, and store the things that change the most, and the things that are most important to me there (Quicken, e-mail, etc).

This product also allows me to schedule backups, and either do a full or incremental.

I now do a full backup of the data folder every Sunday morning at 1:00 AM. This can write directly to CD/DVD and can span volumns (spanning doesn't work very well with un-attended backups, however).

One issue I ran into. If the computer goes into hibernate, and the option to wake computer to perform task isn't selected in the scheduler, it won't happen. This past Sunday was the first time I had it go automatically, and the backup was waiting on me when I got up and checked.


krw

Hi Ken. Thanks for the information and the link. I'll give it a look to see what it's all about. Over the years hard drive failures have sold more backup hardware and software than any other method. I have just recently lost my backup hard drive. One day it was there and the next it wasn't. No warning of any kind, just Poof and it was gone.

I have been using Power Quest Drive Image to make image backups of my primary drive. But, of course, all my backup images were stored on the backup drive because they were too big to put on CD. Now I have a DVD recorder so I hope to do more image backups, assuming they aren't too big for a DVD now. My primary drive has over 60 gig in use now so the image may be too big for a DVD now.

Well that's why I bought a pair of hard drives and am running Raid mirrored drives. Hopefully I wont lose both drives at he same time. I still need to do data backups though so I'll give the link a look.

Thanks