PCA Forums

What do you use to backup important data such as family photos.
I have several computers and NAS at my house and manually mirror drives on the network. My family photos is stored on the NAS but I have a backup on the HDD in the HTPC.

With the cost of 1TB hdd coming down I wonder how many people store that much data on one HDD. I am skeptical about storing that much data on one disc.

how do you do it and what brands? This might get some responses but I prefer WD HDDs.

carbonite.com

we sell a "subscription" through work.. they have a 2gig freebee.

As for photos, the only thing I care about on a HDD, I keep duplicates on another PC (so stored on 2) and I occasionally burn them to DVDs too.
The odds of two HDDs, 2 PCs failing are rare.

I have multiple backup systems but I also started using Amazon S3's off-site backup several months ago after a tornado darn near took out my house last year. Costs me about $2.25 a month to backup around 11Gb.

BACKUPS:

- My workstation uses Allway Sync to copy my data (Documents Folder, mail folders, address book, etc) to the server daily at 3am.

- Workstation saves an Acronis image of the boot drive to an external hard drive once a week for OS disaster recovery, and these images are archived (I use this in lieu of System Restore)

- I sync my most important files daily to my key-chain flash drive (all important files are encrypted) using Allway Sync. I have it setup so all I have to do is insert the flash drive and it syncs automatically.

- The server backups all it's data including the latest workstation backup weekly to an external hard drive which archives 4 weeks of backups.

- The server burns a backup to a DVD-DL disc once a month which I take to my bank and drop into my self-service safe deposit box.

- Every night around 5am my server uses Jungle Disk to synchronize all data to my Amazon S3 off-site storage account.

- My wife's laptop does a nightly backup to the server and to Amazon S3.

I would highly recommend Amazon S3 with Jungle Disk. Very inexpensive, very secure and very reliable. I've got several of my clients using it now, including one guy who keeps about 40Gb on his account.

Keep in mind that a lot of the freebee sites that do backups are fly by night & your backup may not be there in a year or two. That said, I'd feel good with either Carbonite or Amazon. In the end, I have only photos & some documents that I absolutely would be devastated about a loss. It's a shame that video takes up so much space, because I've got about 40gigs of family videos that I just can't bring myself to pay to backup online. I always have a spare drive lying around that I keep updated with my documents in the case of drive failure so that I can have rapid recovery (as opposed to downloading all of my files).

I use Tape backup on a weekly basis for my documents, photos and mail. Everything else is synchronized regularily to a second HDD that i take offline after sync. The same data that i sync to second disk is also burned to DVD but more seldom.
If i had the cash, i would buy a bigger tape drive. Tape ftw mile

i use windows backup and a windows form of rsync called deltacopy
together they are unstoppable!

Chisel & stone. Worked for the Romans & Egyptians.