Backup hard drive help

[ScarabChris]

I know there are some good computer guys here (Wiley)so maybe someone can point me in the right direction.

I need a couple of backup hard drives. I need one for my business computer. God forbid my main hard drive crashes I would be screwed. All the financial and customer information would be lost. So I need one that I can hook up to the main computer via USB so I can back up this information say once a week.

The the wife wants one to store pictures on. Since the baby we are accumulating thousands of photos. She wants this drive so she can take it to her moms house so she can load pics from their computer or take pics from the hard drive and load them into her moms computer.

Help me out.

[pmagrady]

A true back up should be stored at a separate location to avoid physical disasters. You can try an online back up service. I have used carbonite for 2 years.

Edited March 6, 2010 by MrPat

[Boz]

Chris, I use a 1TB Western Digital "My Book" external hard drive on my big desktop PC, and a small 500GB Western Digital for my laptop. The 1TB is about the size of a hardback book, cost about $179 @ Costco, and the 500GB ($79) is about the size of an iPod. Both connect via USB. They are easily portable, easy to operate, and quick to connect/disconnect. I've got both PCs set to automatically back up the entire hard drives once a week.

The little one saved my hindquarters (not to mention about ten years worth of pictures) when I had to completely reload the laptop's software and all my data after it got screwed up by a not-so-nice virus.

Edited March 6, 2010 by Boz

[davepen]

There are literally dozens of external hard drive options available today; most are USB but there are some Firewire (IEEE 1394) drives available. Unless performance is of the utmost to you, USB 2.0+ will be fine.

I would offer the following advice, after consulting (as a developer) for 20 years:

Any external drive you buy will fail at some point. In fact, every drive will fail at some point. If you absolutely can't live without a particular bit of data, make multiple copies of it.

Personally, I use two seperate USB hard drives, in addition to the source. I make copies of copies. At least one drive is left at home at all times. USB drives usually fail because they are dropped, or damaged in some way. This is far more likely with the drive in my briefcase, but less-so with my drive at home.

Online backup services are relatively new to the general public. I don't use them, and I have privacy issues with them, but they do seem to be a viable alternative to rolling your own.

Questions to ask include of an online backup provider might include:

How accessible is my data when I need it?

What happens if you (the provider) lose my data? (This has never happened, right?)

Who has access to my data? It's pretty-much a given that your data is private, but does the company providing the service "mine" this data in any way? You'd be surprised. Google mines all your email if you use any form of Google Mail.

When I leave your service, what happens to my data?

I've not read the service level agreements for outfits like Carbonite. Make sure you read the fine-print before hand.

It's a wild and woolly world out there.

Good luck.

[ScarabChris]

Yeah I'm not crazy about the online back up.

Any recommendations on a particular brand and size of drive for what I am looking to do?

[Frank]

I bought a one terabyte Iomega at Compusa for $76 dollars.

[frank1861]

Western digital makes a series of external usb drives that are set up in a RAID. Its essentially two hard drives in one case that can be either setup to mirror each other or strip the info between both drives for faster performance. When setup to mirror the info if one drive fails the other has an exact copy of the data. Only downside is that it is big. Personally if you go the route. I would leave it setup on a desk at home and just use a usb thumb drive to move the pics to the inlaws PC.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=466

In my business computer I use a Traven tape drive. I have about 20 gigs of info and I use 10 tapes which I rotate weekly and replace every 6 months. It backs up at night and it takes about 7 hours. Every morning I swap out the tapes which I keep at home in a media fire safe. I've been this for awhile and it works well.

With both it really depends on how much you need to back up.

[davepen]

1TB external drives are commonplace and relatively inexpensive. Buy the largest drive you can afford and get a second one for your wife. If she's going to be hauling it all over, keep your business data off of there.

A few other thoughts:

Avoid RAID configurations for backup drives; particularly external, portable ones. Striping (RAID 0) is intended to increase performance and available disk space at the expense of recoverability. If you lose one drive in the stripe-set, all your data is gone.

Backing up your data once a week is only sufficient if you can afford to lose a week's worth of data. Daily should be your absolute minimum, and even that only allows you to recover to your last daily backup.

If you have a large number of files that change daily, consider doing a full backup once a week and daily incremental backups (only files that have changed since your last full backup). This will reduce the amount of time necessary to back up a large number of files. To recover, you restore the full and then any incrementals, in order, to the point in time you want.

What operating system(s) are you using?

[frank1861]

DSP, whats the issue with with using a mirrored RAID? Many large servers use a hot swappable drive setup in full mirrored or a mix of stripped and mirrored. Why would that be a problem? It never makes sense to use a striped setup for back up but I don't see a reason not to when its mirrored.

[davepen]

Frank, you're talking about different things...

There are several different RAID levels:

RAID 0 is commonly known as striping; data is written across both disks as if they were one, big disk. Performance is great, but if one drive fails, all the data is lost as you need both member drives in the set to be "complete."

RAID 1 is known as mirroring; the data is identical on both disks. You can lose one drive with no adverse affects. Performance is a good as your slowest drive.

There are also RAID 0+1 (01) and RAID 1+0 (10) configurations which offer the best of both worlds. RAID 10 is a mirrored disk which is then striped. RAID 01 is a striped set which is then mirrored.

The RAID level described in your previous post was RAID 0, which is dangerous if you can't deal with data loss.

RAID 10 and RAID 01 kick butt, but since you need more than two drives for either, it isn't likely to be an off-the-shelf external USB hard drive option.

For servers, I use both all the time. I run RAID 01 at home, in fact.