Whatever media you use, make it redundant. We use a daily, weekly and monthly system that uses a total of 12 tapes. Monday-Thursday get reused every time their day rolls around. 4 Friday tapes so we have a months worth of end-of-week backups. 4 tapes for end-of-month backups. Weekly and monthly backups are stored off-site.

Bottom Line: hard disk space is cheap...'tiny media'...i.e. disks, zips, floppies, etc...is unreliable and time consuming...buy external drives...hell, buy an ipod.

i'm not our small office's IT guru but i know the basics. we do a daily tape backup (soon to be replaced with two rotating external hard drives ((internal drives in cases 'cause its so cheap and the tapes are getting damn expensive)) and then we also have another external drive we take offsite and back up every two weeks. its one of those sexy Porsche Designed drives. 150 bucks. This system works for us because we've had 3 office floods (don't ask...) and the off site storage is important.

So, the daily backups are switched out every two days...if you f something up and need the original file you have the 'day before file' and the drives last longer...if one drive doesn't work you're two days behind...if both fail, you're down to two weeks.

All this stuff is run on Retrospect software...pretty failsafe and easy to use.

Usually it takes a catastrophe like you have experienced to make your boss 'see the light' and start investing in this type of hardware. Depending on how much data you need, a good system you put together yourself can be had for 1/2 the cost of a cpu...and if the check-signer balks just remind them how much your time costs...they love that;-)

Dude, you should have bought Dells.

External hard drives are the easiest and cheapest way, and you can move them. But I would never rely on something that fragile for long term back up (one drop and you are spending a small fortune to have the data recovered). For long term DVDs and the newer double sided DVDs are really cost effective. Then store the DVDs offsite. This is my method, but I don't have many computers to back up.

A lot depends on how much data you have to backup. I have tons of psd files that are huge, like 400mbs, and animations that take up a lot of space.

Nothing is completely safe, though, as I've had DVD/CDs fail and hard drives fail (only internal ones, never had a problem with external ones - which do have some shock absorption).

Iomega's new drive looks nice and isn't outrageous, but long term who knows how long it will be made.

There is also a new company called Mirra that is a 'personal server'. It's basically a small server, but has software and is setup to allow easy access from remote locations. Not that it's rocket science, but convenience is always nice. Not sure about the cost/performance issue, though.

used to have tapes, got an external hard drive to back up, no messy tape BS. its a dream.

everything else about the job is up for a different definition all together

For $50 per month we back up 10gb of data every day and archive weekly and monthy all online. No tapes, no drives no worries.

vancity73 - whats the website for that company

Not much of a site, but their software is very tight.

dtscomputer.com

Off site backup is the safest way. VanCity73's option looks pretty good and I be the company that does the backing up has redundancy on their end so you don't have to worry about that.

Online backup seems nice, but it must take forever! how long does it take you to back up each day (obviously it can run overnight)? What kind of connection do you have?

I use www.ibackup.com to transfer large files, and it's nice, but it takes hours (on a cable connection) to upload a CD's worth of info.

buy a commodore 64 and stick with the large disks.....the ones previous to the floppy, its the best advice i can give u (old skool rules!)

We back up about 20gb of current work & user directories and about another 20gb of archive material (dead projects, libraries, portfolios…) as a small office.

Having experienced 2 complete HD failures and an apparent tape backup failure which made it look like we lost ALL our work, current and archive (tapes were ok, drivers were corrupt – replaced & recovered) about 6 years ago we have a very redundant system.

Nightly we backup all current jobs, accounting and user directories to DDS4 tape on a rotating schedule where we can go back up to 2 months. We also nightly (including weekends) do a network copy to a “hidden” drive on the network (good use for those old computers) that we can go back 2 weeks on. In addition, when projects are completed they are burnt to 2 CD’s – one that stays in the office and 1 that goes off-site (we also keep a copy on the network in a library for reference). Monthly, an additional tape backup is run on the libraries and archives that are not backed up nightly as DDS-4’s hold about 20gb max. compressed so we can’t back up everything to tape daily and the libraries and archives are updated relatively rarely.

External hard drives and hot-swap front bay drives are nice but there are serious issues with how delicate they are. I would not trust them.

You can outsource an offsite company to do back-up which works well for smaller firms. For larger firms that do it on site a tape back-up is still your best bet. We do ours on servers that are in a 2-hour rated fire proof server room and we have a second set goto an off site loc with the IT guy each night.

I've heard of firms using CD-R's and DVD-R's. Bad news. Tape is still the best by far. Even better that HD. That shit is your life blood. Don't mess around with it.

Why is a tape drive more reliable than a CD or DVD (assuming that the write is verified)? I thought the advantage was that you've got large sizes and they can be rewritten?

Sony has a 23 GB DVD burner ($3k though) and with the new blue laser ones coming out soon, it should come close to eliminating the tape market. Correct me if I am wrong, but that's what I've read.

I am curious, as the tech guys in the office I work at (sometimes) have suggested they do that because the tapes are outrageously expensive (although they do have a mirrored server offsite - kinda cool but most cost a ton).

The tape vs. CD/DVD question came up in the office a few years back and our IT department sent out an email talking about the differences and why tape is a better back-up and archival format. The just of it was that the construction of digital discs is fragile and does decay over time. They talked about the materials and methods for making CD's and how heat, humidity, etc. can easily damage a CD. Kinda like the example most people know of leaving an audio CD in a hot car and seeing how the mirrored surface starts looking funny. Tape is just more stable.

better serach usenet.

for personal use, i've tried cdr. but cd burns are too picky. messy & time consuming, therfore backups don't get done!!

i'll probably use a second hd. in a portable case, if i discover those cases don't become obsolete in two years, as most computer stuff does. else, i might just put tyhe 'external' hd in a 5 1/4 tray adapter.. or something.. i'd like a way to snap open the box and grab the drives fast.

for business, you might search info on raid controllers, continuous backup, etc.


re: offline storage. maybe you want to check out the security/encryption, if that might be a concern.

plenty of articles in recent news about cd media failure

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=%22cd+r%22+%7Ccd+failure++rot&lr=&sa=N&tab=nw

my impression is that think cdr is an even more nebulous media. (as far as cd industry outsiders will ever know)

Normally an office server runs a RAID system, often with two haddisks with excactly the same content.

This way the workstations can read faster from the server, and there are always two copies of the current data. So if one disk crashes, you have the other one. Maximum a few minutes of data lost, and no need to back up all the time!

When a project is done, and no longer active, it is burned on dvds, and put on external haddisks for easy access.

This is a relativly cheap and very relieable solution, that doesn't require alot of attention from employees.


ap

RAID shouldn't increase your access speed unless you are using RAID 0, which splits the data between two drives. But this does not duplicate any data, and if either hard drive fails you lose everything.

It sounds like you are running RAID 1, which would not increase the data access speed.

I've spoken to a competent tech guy (that is in charge of a 60 or so person firm, renderfarm, and mostly dual proc machines) and he insists that tape is the best and most reliable way to go. I"ve got some research to do, but from what I understand there are prosumer machines that only cost a few hundred and tapes are relatively cheap. HP something-or-other. I'll try to post when I learn more.

Ext. Hard drives are great, but you need to have at least one copy off site. DVDs don't seem to be that reliable, at least not in the long term. This is what I use know, but would like something better, I think, at least an option.

Iomega's new REV system looks promising - cheap (well, kind of) and fast.

Remember: DVD's will only hold up to 4.7 gigs. Compressed to zip or rar or tgz. That's only about 15 gigs or so max. that you can backup. Tapes are the backup media choice for our firm along with a mirrored RAID config of SCSI drives on the file server. One drive dies - you can break the mirror and get back to production.

Have you ever considered a mirra type system. It is great for smaller firms, it saves a copy of anything you save a copy of, up to 7-8 versions in the past. You can also access all of the files off site through the mirra website, or using like an ftp for your consultants.
Check them out:
http://www.mirra.com/index.html

I had my own hard drive crash with a few key elements on my laptop. Managed to save just about everthing except the email correspondance, could have been worse. But we use an external harddrive and set it up to back up everything on the server every day and then I take it home. very cheap and very simple to do. If you ever think about not doing it talk to someone who didn't have the back-up they'll set you straight.

I just bought the Lacie (designed by Porsche blah blah) 60 gb hard drive. I love this thing. Its 3x5x.5 inches and it is powered through usb. My thesis folder is approaching 6 gbs. So this is a great place to back it up. Good tech support as well.

joshcookie - do you have a Mirra system? They look very interesting, kinda like a small server for dummies (which is fine by me). I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about it. The reviews were so so, but they mentioned it had tons of potential.

Brim - there are the dual sided DVDs now, so close to 10 gigs, Sony has a 23 giger out now, but it's $4k. The new format wars are starting and the capacities are at least 17 gigs, so there is a lot of potential.

Anyone using that Iomega Rev drive? It looks pretty good, and damn fast.

You pretty much nailed it. I use one at home. The support is as good as you can expect. The fact that I have no technical background (as far as hardware goes) and I set it up and I can manage it by myself with no "Tech Guy" says a lot. I think it is a great not so expensive solution for a small office that doesn't want to deal with a traditional server system.

Thanks, good to hear from a real user. I have a Maxtor 250 gig drive and DVDs that I back up with, but the Mirra system seems more flexible. I'll look into that again.

trace-

I was unaware of double sided DVD's. Sounds great. But I still think DVD / CD's are fragile compared to tape backup. Thanks for the info.