Backup Strategies
on 01.13.05, 06:48am in windows • comments (7)
Now that I have most of my digital media (photos, videos and music) residing on a server with a terabyte under RAID-5, I’ve been thinking more about my backup strategy for the rest of my "stuff". On the ‘non-raid’ drive in the server, I have some other shared files which get replicated over to a folder on the RAID every few days.
Most of my ‘personal’ files, such as MS Money databases, source code, documents, etc. all reside on my desktop machine, where I typically use Nero BackItUp every few weeks to backup everything to an external USB hard drive (a lot better than several DVD’s). One of the reasons that I liked BackItUp is because I can easily get to an individual file rather than dealing with some proprietary compressed backup format.
While this works well (for now), it’s still a pretty manual process that feels somewhat clunky. Additionally, as I move closer to dumping the desktop, I want to have a process that works well when the laptop is ‘docked’.
Last week, I purchased Ghost 9 (because I wanted to check out their new WinPE based recovery system) which is great for moving from one hard drive to another, but I’m not really planning on doing complete hard drive snapshots every week. To me, the images are just too large to be practical.
I guess I was curious on what other people are doing to keep their precious data backed up. Any thoughts or suggestions?
Brian Hampson (January 13, 2005 @ 10:21 am)
Why not keep EVERYTHING on RAID5? Why only part?
Dustin Mihalik (January 13, 2005 @ 10:22 am)
I use Karen’s Replicator to backup everything on my network to a central server and then to an external drive. It’s a pretty simple VB app, but it works really well.
http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp
She’s got some other good free software, too.
Barry Dorrans (January 13, 2005 @ 10:43 am)
I do image both laptops every week, handy when the wife’s hard drive died, and she killed mine with a wine spillage.
It gets done every Sunday morning to an external drive whilst I sit back with a cup of coffee, marlboro and the Sunday repeats of a complete Dr Who story.
I use True Image, not Ghost, because Ghost 8 seemed incapable of detecting my external drive in any way, shape or form.
My worry is my 3 little servers; I keep meaning to get a RAIDed NAS, then get TrueImage Server, and schedule nightly images to the NAS.
I don’t see why the size of a backup file is a problem to be honest, it’s a balance against the pain of restoration anyway, an image is far easier to restore than partial files and no backups of the registry or your program files directory. Last time I rebuilt the laptop from scratch it took just under 12 hours to get everything installed (Visual Studio is such a bitch), and another 4 hours to pull all my files back from various places. Why worry when I can schedule an image whilst I sleep?
jax (January 13, 2005 @ 2:43 pm)
Hi
You know.. lately I wonder more and more often if I should apply for a job @ Microsoft.. I mean, the amount of stuff you buy on a weekly basis is simply amazing!
Steve (January 13, 2005 @ 2:53 pm)
Yeah, I have a bit of a spending problem. Ghost was only $39 though…
Adam Hill (January 13, 2005 @ 10:13 pm)
I swear by Retrospect from Dantz. I use it to backup 6 computers here.
When you get a Maxtor external HD they throw in a free copy that works on the local CPU only, but upgrade to Pro (~100.00) and you get 3 computer licenses and you can add extra computers for $29.00.
Has full distaster recovery CD making mode and normal file recovery.
Omar Shahine (January 14, 2005 @ 2:42 pm)
I am currently using IBackup http://www.ibackup.com for 5GB of online storage in the cloud for $9 a month. They also give you free software to automatically backup your stuff. It works great.