WHats the best way to back up over 300 gig of Data

tech

Ok I have collected over 300 gig of data, mp3 in the last year or so, I havent got any real backup system in place to backup all my files, whats the best way of doing this?

BigEejit

For cheapness and speed go for a big HDD .... unless you can get your hands on a cheap DLT and loadsa tapes .... remember: they are tapes ... reliable yes, but still tapes.

Kai

The thing is HD's have a high chance of failure. If it was me and it was 300 gig of stuff you cant afford to loose then id splash out on the DVD option.

4.3 GB dvd's and youll need about 70 of them which will work out around 210 euro.
They wont crash and should stay usable until better storage technology are available.
Its a cheaper option than the HD and it is more secure.

Heres a link to something similar
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=24609792&m=2370928495

vibe666

personally, I'd go for the HDD option. would be the cheapest and easiest option in the end. 2x 160gb HD's would cover it, and probably work out cheaper than anything else. do the backup, then just take them out, wrap them in cotton woll any baby bunny rabbit fur, and keep them in a big box full of feathers till you need them. or put them on a shelf.

DVD's might work out OK, but it'd take you fecking ages to do the backup, and be expensive, as unless you already have a burner, you're looking at 150 euro for a half decent one.

tapes wuld be the most reliable, but unless you plan on spending a couple of grand on a fast drive and enough tapes you're gonna spend the rest of your life swapping the tapes and you'll have got another 300 gigs before you've finished the backup!

djr

use RAR multimedia compression, you should be able to get them down to about 1.43MB if you compress them 50 times.:p

but seriously.

if you go the tape route it would need to be a bigass drive (like a 40/80, 80/160 or higher). to run a drive like that you need a decent u160 scsi card, which are quite often 64bit pci. tape is an expensive way to go tbh. basically what you want is a complete up-to-date copy of your data. so it would have to be HDD for the most flexible solution. if you use dvd you will have to either back up new stuff seperately onto different disks, or start from scratch after erasing countless dvd-rws.

you can grab 2 or 3 120 gig drives for your best bet.

basically it's not going to be cheap whatever you do. it'll end up as a few hundred €'s either way.

at €1 per gigabyte you could go with this

ando

I guess this is a home computer, you wont be going off buying corporate tape drives are you? and if I was you I would'nt bother getting a Dvd burner as it would take a good while to back up all that stuff

My advice, get 2083 floppy disks

or get a big ass HD and put it as slave

Capt'n Midnight

300GB = 208,333 Floppies

Buying a second hard drive is the easiest option. DVD may be slow but you should not have any of the problems with tape:

Though you could have got a nice DDS4 (24GB) drive and scsi card and cables on the FS forum recently...

Since the data you are backuping is already compressed you can't use compression on the TBU (and if you did then you might have problems restoring from a different brand of TBN later...)

Cabaal

Hmm my first suggestion would be a **** load of floppy disks.

but on second though DVD media is your best bet, get yourself a nice drive and at around €1 +/- for a blank DVD its abit espensive but after your done backing up your 300GB of data you can use the drive for many other uses.

I'm dead satisfied with the drive I got a month ago...

hertz

Floppy disc!!!!:eek: :eek: What if most of the files are above 1.4mb?
And are tapes still going, Are they becoming obsolete? Id say DVD or HDD.

Hertz

Capt'n Midnight

Originally posted by hertz
Floppy disc!!!!:eek: :eek: What if most of the files are above 1.4mb?
And are tapes still going, Are they becoming obsolete? Id say DVD or HDD.

Hertz

Tape formats keep getting bigger - you can still buy old tapes - but it's harder to find old compatible drives...

Floppies - just use a winzip compatible utility (eg: power archiver 6.1) to span across disks.
Extracting LOTR.AVI
Please insert disk 3125 and press any key to continue...
Data error reading disk 3125
At one disk per minute this would take 52 hours
(14.5 hours overtime)

ando

Btw just incase someone understands my post wrongly, I was taking the pi$s when I said use floppies!

BigEejit

80 - 90 DVD's .... You'd have to document what went where fairly well otherwise you'd be up in a heap in no time ... searching through that many disks would be a pain in the ass ..... But if you could get the disks DVD+r's or -r's cheap then this would probably be the cheapest alternative ...... just a complete pain in the ass to build (even with the fasted DVD writer how long to write a full 4.7GB disk?

I still think that for versatility and speed a drive is the best option ... Keep in mind that this is a backup, and would not be in general use, it should last a long time. ...
I saw on some hardware site that there is a PCI (33/66Mhz)hardware raid controller with 4 SATA ports so you could set up a raid 5 (3 data disks, 1 parity) group ..... very very nice ... but probably quite pricey ....

Capt'n Midnight

AFAIK any resonably priced IDE RAID card only supports mirroring.
Also if you loose data because of a software crash or virus or accidental deletion EXACTLY the same thing will happen to the mirror

You can get external USB2 drive bays for about €50-60 you plug in the drive when you want to copy stuff and then disconnect it afterwards (internal bays are not usually hot swappable) - the idea here is to not have the drive on when it is not being used - again less likely to get hit by sw problems.,.,.

GUI

a western digital usb 2 hd
speed and throughput off these babies is amazing

i get 1.1gigabyte through on transfer rates a minute..

i think theres a 250 or 300gig model

BigEejit

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
AFAIK any resonably priced IDE RAID card only supports mirroring.

Indeed you are correct about IDE Raid ... but I said SATA ... the board I saw today was reviewed today at theinquirer.net and it is available from at least one vendor for the princely sum of US$180 ... I know that is over in the states and probably dont ship here, but its a brand new product and should be for sale by large european vendors at a lower cost in the near future ... it wont be much cheaper because the brains on that card is an chip to XOR the data over the four volumes. tomshardware.com has a big write up today about the merits of raid on SATA......
In case the original poster is wondering about this raid, it's 4 physical drives ... but you will only see 3 of them, the fourth is a parity volume and comes into play when you have a bad/dead drive, you pull the dead one and replace it with a blank new one and the controller will rebuild the data that was on the original .... if you lose the parity disk you will be able to access all your data, but it is unprotected ...
Only problem is performance, some XOR ASIC implementations are crap and some are great .... whatever one is used is going to be slower than just writing to the disk directly...

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight

You can get external USB2 drive bays for about €50-60 you plug in the drive when you want to copy stuff and then disconnect it afterwards (internal bays are not usually hot swappable) - the idea here is to not have the drive on when it is not being used - again less likely to get hit by sw problems.,.,.

If someone is backing up data, they shouldnt/wont be going near it after doing the copy from their working data, unless of course to copy from it when they phucked up the working copy of the data .... the only thing the USB approach provides is physical seperation from the box (overvoltage related issues etc) ... if it gets dropped or mishandled, you could have an expensive paperweight and no backup