Backing up

[Doug Nelson]

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

[thomasgeorge]

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

[Doug Nelson]

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.

[chris h]

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.

[Doug Nelson]

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.

[chris h]

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.

[Doug Nelson]

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

[chris h]

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.

[Doug Nelson]

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.

[KevinBE]

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?

[kaulike]

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

[KevinBE]

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.

[Bob Walden]

dvd's

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

[jeaniesa]

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

[KevinBE]

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.