Comments on: What’s Your Backup Strategy? (Or, Putting A Price On Memories)

By: Rod Templeton

Rod Templeton — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:45:53 +0000

Ouch. Once I started looking for archive/backup of all the photos of my twins, my wife made it quite clear that my life depended on NEVER losing all of the photos ;)

So, I’m a little paranoid about how I backup. I use Microsoft’s FolderShare, and every Friday night all of the photos from the week get transferred directly to my work PC. Every three months I burn 3 DVDs – one stays at home, one goes to my work, and the third goes to my parents’ place.

I’m in the process of looking for an external drive, but I don’t like the prospect of a single point of failure meaning that everything could be gone.

By: King Tut

King Tut — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 07:38:51 +0000

Backups are great. I only wish there was a way to standardize media (right…).

I’ve got hand-me-down reel to reel’s of us as kids from my parents.

Can I play those in my DVD player?

By: TheProf

TheProf — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:14:43 +0000

Well Tone, I’m glad to hear that you managed to recover the data, but the cost — yeouch.

For myself, I have lots of data all over the place. The way I back it up is as follows:

- resurrected my old PII machine.
- shoved in a couple of hard drives, one of which already had XP on it.
- shared it across my home network
- downloaded SyncToy (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx)
- set it up to sync my laptop (any anything else) across the network to the PII server.
- Voila! Instant backups. With my gigabit network at home (YAY gigabit!) I can backup 20+ GB of data in minutes.

That was my first attempt at this system. Were I to do it again I would modify the system by installing Linux on the backup server, slapping in two identical drives, and activating software RAID. Hook up your DVD burner for off-site backups and you’re good to go.

By: JT

JT — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:31:16 +0000

I’m backup crazy. I must have 3 external drives (2 at home, 1 at work) all which keep duplicate content of my personal laptop. Backing up is time consuming but after my first crash … I never want to go through that experience again. I did shell out the $1000+ for my photos. Some memories you just can’t put a price on. Anyways the guys at CBL data recovery (http://www.cbltech.ca) see it all the time, drives are doomed to fail. I chose the non-critical service 15 days, so my recovery originally $1650 was priced at $1250. Definitely an expensive lesson. JT

By: Tony Hung

Tony Hung — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 05:34:55 +0000

@Ryan — that’s how JungleDisk works, actually … and I worked out the cost. The per gigabyte cost of using JungleDisk vs. Mozy is a bit cheaper. The sad thing is that my hard drive got wrecked in the middle of my first back up. :P

By: Jenny

Jenny — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 04:54:05 +0000

For online backup and storage info, the best site I recommend is the Backup Review website:

http://www.BackupReview.info

By: Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 04:18:49 +0000

After my work laptop experienced a “worst-case scenario” failure it spooked me enough to figure out how to backup our home systems more effectively.

My only catch – it couldn’t be something I had to remember to do. It just wouldn’t happen.

Been using mozy.com now (at work and home) for most of this year. Absolutely 100% reccomend it. $4.95 for unlimited backup on personal computers and it just chugs away in the background backing you up as the system idles.