HDD Backups

[iceman (Mike)]

Reading Sheeny's thread got me thinking that I really should back up the data on my 300gig external HDD, because if I lost it, I'd really be upset.

And who knows how long those drives last being transported around the place, even in those pretty shiny red Vantec cases

So I put in a DVD, and then realise that it's nowhere near enough capacity to store even a quarter of what I want.

I've got my 300gig partitioned into a 100gig drive to start with, and I've used about half of that with photography (raws, tiffs and processed) and astrophotography (zipped up avi's etc).

Fitting 50gig is going to take over 10 DVD's..

Is this my only option, apart from buying another harddisk to use as a backup for my external HDD?

Thanks

[Doug]

Hi Mike, what if you compressed your Data onto the DVDs? I'm not up on things much these days but I think with windows 95 there was a 'doublespace' utility, what it might be called these days I don't know.

best,
Doug

[h0ughy (David)]

unfortunately mike you must look at the technology you own, my advice is do a backup of each partition separately Mike, unless you buy a 300gig DAT tape backup system or a blueray disc.

[iceman (Mike)]

No probs, i'll just span multiple DVD's I guess.

Media is fairly cheap these days. The old files won't change and only need to be backed up once.

[mojo (Terry)]

Get another 300GB drive. Disk space is cheap.

DVD's aren't necessarily permanent and secure storage anyway.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

I know what you mean Mike. I've had my NexStar for just over a month and already it is half full. I think it's a little bit like kitchen cupboards. No matter how many cupboards and draws you have in a kitchen, you always seem to fill them up and need more room.

[Jonathan]

DVD's are the cheapest /gig, but like Terry pointed out, they have a limited life span. My money would be on another hard disk for the really important stuff.

[cjmarsh81]

As Houghy said a BlueRay Disc would be nice. I think they are around 50GB. I don't think they are available yet though. If I am wrong let me know.

[sheeny (Al)]

The most important concept Mike is simply don't have your data only in the one place.

I use an external 250GB drive and a little program called SecondCopy to backup all my data. So its there, and on my working drives. The lappy is the biggest risk, as I only back it up when I think of it... everything else is automatic.

I reckon nothing fills HDDs as well as astrophotography! After I'm finished with my avi's I currently archive them on DVD - uncompressed so I can very easily get at them to use them. I think I have about 14 DVDs now. I will have to start backing these up too at some stage (especially when I get better at capturing!) becasue as has been said, DVDs aren't forever either.

Al.

[iceman (Mike)]

You really should consider using winzip or winrar to compress your avi's, Al. It compresses them to like 10-15% of the former size, and the compression is of course lossless to the data itself when you uncompress it.

Huge space saving.

[mojo (Terry)]

Originally Posted by iceman

You really should consider using winzip or winrar to compress your avi's, Al. It compresses them to like 10-15% of the former size, and the compression is of course lossless to the data itself when you uncompress it.
Huge space saving.

Except that, when the media partially fails after you've compressed 100 files, the zip may not be recoverable. Instead of 1 of 100 files being corrupt if they were stored uncompressed, all the files may be lost if compressed together.

Scared yet?

[sheeny (Al)]

Both good points Mike and Mojo. I did consider compression but decided not to.

At the moment I'm really using the DVDs to free up space on my lappy. I find it takes no time at all to fill my 50G D: drive... oh, well maybe two or three sessions of imaging and processing...

I keep all my assembled stills and finished images on my 300G L: drive on my PC which is automatically backed up. Once I've finished processing my avis, I'm simply copying the avi's to DVD for the time being, so I know I can get any one of them back easily whenever I want to reprocess one.

I know it's not ideal from a backup point of view at all! I need to think a little bit more about what I'm doing there. One thought is that I could make a proper compressed backup from the dvd's to my external 250G drive. It's just a matter of getting organised to do it!

That's why I like SecondCopy. Once set up it looks after all my backups without relying on me. It's just the lappy and the DVDs that aren't always connected that are messy...

Al.