Backup Methods?

[AndrewB]

What do people around here use to backup their important data? This comes to mind after painfully reading about this guy who lost his DOOM project..

Me? Every once in a while, I go to the computer downstairs, and I backup everything on my hard drives to a 4GB/8GB tape. After I've done that, I bring it back upstairs, lock it away in my private disk case, so nobody can tamper with anything on it. I just don't understand people who couldn't be bothered.

[Guest Fanatic]

I have a batch file setup in scheduler to run at 5am every morning (just uses XCOPY with some flags to get dir structure and all), copies my development drive to two other hard drives (daily copies on three different hard drives). I also burn a CD of the same (or multiple CD's) about once a month.

[Jon]

Online backups and mirrors are good. Also, OPEN SOURCE.

[stphrz]

Uhhhh. Floppy disks. Heh :). Well I also upload stuff to some webspace I got from my isp....

[Gokuma]

Not zip disks. You get the click of death and you're screwed.

HDs, CDs, and super disks.

[AndrewB]

Gokuma said:

You get the click of death and you're screwed.

What's that? I haven't heard of that saying before.

[Peter Heinemann]

I use some SCSI Harddrives and magnetooptical disks.
SCSI HDs are much safer than IDEs, maybe you should add an Adaptec SCSI Contoller to your PCs (or buy an older Macintosh G3 beige Tower, which is much more enjoyable and much faster than your PC:-). Zips are pieces of shit, forget about them. CD-Rs are nicer and cheap, but data stored on them is only safe for a time of around 5 years, because the layer which holds the data information is made of an organical material and suffers by shrinking, so the data integrity will be lost. My advice is: Make multiple backups each day on HDs which runs for back only (to safe its mechmanism), make multiple magmento-optical backups from time to time and store them at different places (you can also use a CD-burner, but do not trust the CD-Rs or RD-RWs for more than 2-3 years.

[sirgalahadwizar]

I use a CD-RW to backup my important files (zips, and otehr misc. datas). Very reliable, quite cost-effective. CD-R's are for hardcopies, i don't use them often.

[Guest Nuno Correia]

Finished stuff usually gets stuck on a CD-R and things that I'm currently working on are stored on CD-RW's.

I wouldn't recommend using zip drives. They're too small and unreliable. The only use I give them is to trade files between friends and such.

MO disks: they have large storage capacity, but are bulky and expensive.

Cartridges or tapes, like the MO disks, can also carry massive amounts of information, but these are compact and comparatively cheap. Their only downside is the slow write/read rate.

[bitstate]

AndrewB said:

What's that? I haven't heard of that saying before.

Actually i think its the jazz disk's that get the click of death.

According to alot of people jazz disks will after some time of use produse one "click" sound and then within the minute completly crash (and then I mean fysically not just loosing the data....).

I've never heard this about zip disk's though....

[AndrewB]

Nuno Correia said:

Finished stuff usually gets stuck on a CD-R and things that I'm currently working on are stored on CD-RW's.

I wouldn't recommend using zip drives. They're too small and unreliable. The only use I give them is to trade files between friends and such.

MO disks: they have large storage capacity, but are bulky and expensive.

Cartridges or tapes, like the MO disks, can also carry massive amounts of information, but these are compact and comparatively cheap. Their only downside is the slow write/read rate.

So I've got it pretty well off.. It's hard to think that my older brother once bought like 20 ZIP disks back up everything on his hard drive.. Sheesh! Sure, tapes take a couple of hours backing up, but I do that during the night, anyway. Yes, they are very slow restoring data, but I don't consider that a factor.

Aren't there some kind of CDRs that are guaranteed not to deteriorate? Ones that are a little more expensive? That would be worth it, because I've got a little over a GB of very important data that I wrote two CDRs about two years ago or so.. I did it to save disk space. :|

[locust]

Tarball the fucker and FTP. In between (although not since the power supply died) another machine here at home, a shell account at my ISP and two shell accounts at uni, I consider myself to be fairly safe.

[Peter Heinemann]

bitstate said:

Actually i think its the jazz disk's that get the click of death.

According to alot of people jazz disks will after some time of use produse one "click" sound and then within the minute completly crash (and then I mean fysically not just loosing the data....).

I've never heard this about zip disk's though....

Jazz-cartriges have termical problems. They become to hot. Especially the external ones in their original Iomega-housings with no cooling-fan built in are a pretty data-grave. They should not be run for longer than 10 minutes or so.
I have several other dead drives at home: Do you remember the SyQuest EZ 135? Or the Nomai MCD 540? The "Noise before Death" sounds a little bit like horseshoes to me.

Have forgotten:

Never run any removable disk in upside position, even when the manual or the box-picture says its OK. It looks nice and saves space on your desktop, but the read-write heads could touch the disk.

[Jon]

bitstate said:

Actually i think its the jazz disk's that get the click of death.

According to alot of people jazz disks will after some time of use produse one "click" sound and then within the minute completly crash (and then I mean fysically not just loosing the data....).

I've never heard this about zip disk's though....

Yeah zips get click of death too.