Back it up questions?

ZuntarZuntar North Carolina Icrontian
edited November 2005 in Science & Tech
How do you back up your stuff?

I have always been very bad about backing up my stuff and have never lost a drive, but since my HDD died at work for no reason it kinda made me "see the light". :help:

Would you back up to a secondary HDD on the same PC?
Would you back up to PC on your home network?
DVD's, CD's, or external drives?

I need to come up with a plan and stick to it, so please give me your 2 cents!

Comments

  • citrixmetacitrixmeta Montreal, Quebec Icrontian
    edited November 2005
    i usualy burn them the stuff i cannot replace on a dvdrw and update it once in a while.

    but i mean, stuff like games/software/movies, i dont care much for those since versions always get updated and i can always get them back somehow.

    but stuff like personal documents and family pix, i would burninate them.

    I guess another way is to get a secondary drive (either int or ext) dedicated to backup ur current data, meaning, you dont work off it, its only used to replicate your stuff.
  • rapturerapture
    edited November 2005
    A mixture of all of those. I would love to have some kind of raid setup with all my files on one day but thats going to wait till they start upgrading stuff at work :D
  • verselloversello New
    edited November 2005
    I try to stay away from RAID because it doesn't protect you from those "oops I deleted my spreadsheet with all my banking information."

    Generally, you'll want to backup files to a separate hard-drive. But backing up to CD's or tape is usually better, especially if you need to grab something from say, last year. Hard-drives don't last as long as removable media.

    I reccomend you just stick with scheduled jobs with NTBackup... set it and forget it. Run it very late at night as to not interrupt you when you're surfing for pr0n. :fishslap:

    A general backup strategy would be to do a FULL backup on Sunday, and for the other days, do either incremental (faster, saves space, more tedious to restore) or differential (slower, takes more space, faster to restore). Do whatever you feel is best for you based off how much space you have. For the full backup, you'll want to overwrite your previous full backup, and for the incremental/differentials, you'll want to append to the full backup (keeps things nice and tidy)... now if you had removable media, you'd swap it out everytime before the next full backup occurs.

    The backup setup I use on my home server is:
    1. Dedicated hard-drive to store backups.
    2. Monthly system state backups.
    3. Monthly full Pub (mp3's only... I burn all my movies) backups.
    4. Weekly full home folder (My Docs, etc.) / Exchange backups (overwrite weekly).
    5. Incremental daily home folder / Exchange backups.

    Monthly for the pub files since it's not crucial if I have to rollback to a month's before of data, and daily of my My Docs files since all my work is there.
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