PC Back-up utility

[TaeKwonDoDo 0]

Can anyone reccomend a good back-up utility (and hardware) that will back-up my entire hard-drive on a weekly basis?

I just had a close call with my hard-drive...

Thanks,

- Jeff

"That's not flying, it's falling with style."

[DeNReN 0]

spilt beer on it?

[TaeKwonDoDo 0]

After it crashed, I took it and "accidently" dropped it from 14K'

But Gateway helped me restore it anyway.

- Jeff

"That's not flying, it's falling with style."

[Kris 0]

Depends on how much data you're backing up.

Right now I have over 700MB of disk storage on my PC. The important stuff I keep in a RAID 5. If I lose a HD I put in a spare and I keep on cruising after it automatically rebuilds.

For anything over 4 GB (4GB or less, use DVD) you'll want to go tape. You're looking at DAT, AIT, Ultrium, or DLT formats.

Tape is damn pricey but worth it if the stuff you are backing up is 'mission critical'. For home use, you're better off with DAT (I use DDS-4 which gives me 20GB native and up to 40GB compressed per DAT tape) or Travan.

If it's just home stuff I'd spring for another hard drive and a Promise RAID card that will do RAID-1 (mirroring).

It'll basically copy everthing you do to the other drive. If one drive gets written to, so does the other. Two 100GB drives in a RAID-1 will give you 100GB of storage.

Myself, I like RAID-5 (striping with parity). If one drive hoses, you're only down until you can throw in a replacement (if you don't have a hot-spare on stand-by). You need a controller card that will handle it and at least 3 drives. If you have 3 100GB drives you have 200GB of storage. 1/3 of the space on each drive holds parity data that can be used to recreate your data in the event one drive fails. If two drives fail at once you are well & truly fucked but that's rare.

I run 4 Maxtor 160GB SATA drives on a Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 card with 256MB of cache on-board. That's 480GB of storage. Total cost for that 480GB of very fast (because it's striped) protected storage is $166 for the card and $145 each for the drives from NewEgg.

I used to do SCSI raid with a DPT U2W adapter but the price on SCSI is prohibitive and the capacity just isn't there.

Sky, Muff Bro, Rodriguez Bro, and
Bastion of Purity and Innocence!™

[mjosparky 4]

Quote

Depends on how much data you're backing up.

Right now I have over 700MB of disk storage on my PC. The important stuff I keep in a RAID 5. If I lose a HD I put in a spare and I keep on cruising after it automatically rebuilds.

For anything over 4 GB (4GB or less, use DVD) you'll want to go tape. You're looking at DAT, AIT, Ultrium, or DLT formats.

Tape is damn pricey but worth it if the stuff you are backing up is 'mission critical'. For home use, you're better off with DAT (I use DDS-4 which gives me 20GB native and up to 40GB compressed per DAT tape) or Travan.

If it's just home stuff I'd spring for another hard drive and a Promise RAID card that will do RAID-1 (mirroring).

It'll basically copy everthing you do to the other drive. If one drive gets written to, so does the other. Two 100GB drives in a RAID-1 will give you 100GB of storage.

Myself, I like RAID-5 (striping with parity). If one drive hoses, you're only down until you can throw in a replacement (if you don't have a hot-spare on stand-by). You need a controller card that will handle it and at least 3 drives. If you have 3 100GB drives you have 200GB of storage. 1/3 of the space on each drive holds parity data that can be used to recreate your data in the event one drive fails. If two drives fail at once you are well & truly fucked but that's rare.

I run 4 Maxtor 160GB SATA drives on a Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 card with 256MB of cache on-board. That's 480GB of storage. Total cost for that 480GB of very fast (because it's striped) protected storage is $166 for the card and $145 each for the drives from NewEgg.

I used to do SCSI raid with a DPT U2W adapter but the price on SCSI is prohibitive and the capacity just isn't there.

Could you say that again? I have trouble booting the damn thing up. Will I ever learn all that stuff?

My idea of a fair fight is clubbing baby seals