Western Digital Announces the First 2TB Drive

RAID1 and others are cool, but not very useful. All they do is protect against phyical failure of the actual disk. It does not protect against windows failures, power issues, or electrostatic shock. These make up the largest majority of hard drive failure. These large disks are best setup in RAID0 for speedy access to your data. For a quick and relatively inexpensive backup, use an external hardrive with an ESATA connection. Very fast. UNPLUG, and put your external hard drives in a safe place, perferably a fire safe.

Best bet, is a server with hard drives setup in a raid10 for speed and redundancy. The server would plug into a high quality surge protector and battery backup. No peripherals plugged in (minimizes electrostatic shock and surge through USB). Do not forget a surge protector placed on the ethernet cable plugging in to the NIC. Perferably a dedicated ethernet surge protector, not the BS device attached to all in one surge protectors. WHS on this system would be a good bet due to its backup features. Then of course, backup that server when possible onto an external, and put that external in a fire safe.
 
Some website's Top 10 Online Services. I don't anything about the site (google searched it), but it might be a good place to start researching on line backup services.

Just doing a quick glance at it, a service called Mozy catches my eye. $4.95/mo for unlimited storage and it is designed as a backup service. So it excels at backups which is what I am personally looking for. I don't need a on line file storage service as much as a need a secure on-line backup service.
 
I don't use backup software for my backups. I use a file sync program. It's called Super Flexible File Synchronizer (yes, lame name) and it works great. It will create an exact mirrored copy of my files onto another drive, without having to copy every file each time. It even knows if I have moved files on the source drive, and will move them on the target drive, without having to recopy them. It even will E-mail me results of a sync! I have used it for years, and even use it at work.

http://www.superflexible.com/
 
Well to be completely safe, you probably need to do both a local backup (using something like the software Sacedog posted) and an on-line (or at least off site) backup. A local backup won't help if you house is destroyed by fire, etc. But an on-line copy could have issues too (although you hope the service you are using is adequately backing up their own systems).
 
well, looks like my needs far outstrip the online ones. The biggest thing i'd care about is pictures & home video as they're irreplaceable, and we're currently somewhere ~100GB just for that. (and growing weekly, it's simpler to keep them all rather than hunt&peck&delete). The rest of the stuff (email/legal/financial) is perhaps 10GB, but I dunno how I feel about giving that to an unknown source. Probably better for me to setup some form of scheduled FTP to a website that I own, as well as the local backups that I give to my inlaws.

Then again, i can't imagine how long it would take to upload 100GB, even at my 3MBps cxn.
 
I would probably use a Drobo with several Western Digital RE3 drives for data like that. It's a little pricey, but worth it for sure.
 
Forefront Technologies said:
For a quick and relatively inexpensive backup, use an external hardrive with an ESATA connection. Very fast. UNPLUG, and put your external hard drives in a safe place, perferably a fire safe.
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Cavalry 500GB external esata.....died while copying files to it. No warning or explanation. ;) Nothing is safe...
 
Dan (electron) said:
I would probably use a Drobo with several Western Digital RE3 drives for data like that. It's a little pricey, but worth it for sure.
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Since one of my first modern drive failures a few years ago, I only use the "raid edition" drives. They have a longer warranty and a higher MTBF. Two drives in a raid 1 array and two removable backup drives, one that goes into a fire safe, one that goes to a remote location. No problems thus far (knock on wood)
 
beelzerob said:
No warning or explanation. ;) Nothing is safe...
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The whole world is going to pot, won't someone please think of the children!!!

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sic0048 said:
Just doing a quick glance at it, a service called Mozy catches my eye.

I don't need a on line file storage service as much as a need a secure on-line backup service.
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I'm not saying Mozy, by itself, is a bad service. I am saying that you should be careful with Mozy (or any online backup service).

If you want secure backups, then you need to be in full control of the encryption keys. By default Mozy uses a preshared key that is "baked" into the Mozy program. That same key is shared with every other similarly situated user. If someone hacks Mozy (an EMC company) or a wayward Mozy employee decides to access your backup files, they could conceivably decrypt your data, too.

Mozy does (did? it's been a number of months since I last did a deep dive on their stuff) offer the option in some versions to create your own encryption key. If you create your own key, you are solely responsible for figuring out how to appropriately access and export that key as well as safeguard it offline somewhere else.

1) Good
2) Fast
3) Cheap

Pick two, but best of luck finding a solid backup solution that combines fast and cheap! ;-)

Personally? My key files are on my desktop backed up nightly by a schedule task to my server. The server is a 3TB (usable) RAID 5 solution. If the files are more important than even that, then they get burned to CD/DVD+R media and placed in a fire safe. Why "+R" media? The "+R" standard includes more error correction and therefore should in theory be less susceptible to physical damage as well as "bit rot".
 
A. Nonymous said:
Why "+R" media? The "+R" standard includes more error correction and therefore should in theory be less susceptible to physical damage as well as "bit rot".
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You can also do what I do.

After I burn the DVD+R media, I take and do a raid 3 setup on it.

I use QuickPar for this
http://www.quickpar.org.uk/

Just make the Parity information 1/3 of the disc, then burn the 3 sets of parity information to the third disc.

SO, if there IS bit rot, or disc corruption, you can use ISOBuster to copy whatever you can, then use the Parity engine to regenerate up to 1/3 of the disc's data.

One of my projects is going to be putting some NSA hard drives into a fireproof box, with fireproof connectors on it. This way I can have my automation turn the drives on, backup then turn them off.

--Dan
 
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