Thursday, September 17, 2009

Personal Backups

A friend of mine lost a bunch of family pictures and video when his hard drives died (he lost both at the same time). As backup people we are all well aware that the current home computer user does not have an easy and safe way to backup all their data easily. Oh, sure they can buy a USB drive but those can also be destroyed in a fire, flood, or even stolen. There are some online options but wanted to ask those out there what their experiences are with them and any suggestions. I currently have 200+GB I need protected so what are the safest options...and no I wont be buying a tape drive. ;-)

3 comments:

  1. The process I go though to accomplish this is probably a bit different than most. I have a safety deposit box at my local bank. I keep many important items and documents there. It is not that expensive, and provides me with an off site vault of sorts that I use. I have 2 external USB drives, and I will go swap them out, usually about once a month. I use sync programs to keep my system synced to my external drive that sits on my desk.

    I find this to be fairly inexpensive for what I get, and it seems to work for me.

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  2. My office PC was stolen once, there was a brake-in and there was noy I could not recover my data, my backup USB drive was stolen as well.

    My process is probably a bit much, but I've learned my lesson and don't want to be sorry ever again.

    Right now, I am backing my local hard drive on SATA array (it is nice you can buy computers with this feature now).

    I use ghost to backup my system to a third internal hard drive as well. Also I backup to two USB drives (Each USB gets swap every day before I go home, one stays to backup that night and one comes with me. My friend told me to backup to Dell's Datasafeonline.com (the job runs at night and it only backs up the files that have changed that day, so it doesn't take that long to do that.

    My computer at home is indetical to the one at the office, this was planned to make sure am able to test my backups and be able to recover in case something happens to my office PC and allows to recover within hours.

    Again, a bit much, but still cheaper than loosing your data. I hope this helps someone out there.

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  3. Just use Mozy or Carbonite. Less likely chance you'll screw it up.

    Jared

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