O.T. Computer back up question

Re: O.T. Computer back up question *LINK*

Ron in Drums PA

>Can't go wrong with this




USB DRIVE

Re: O.T. Computer back up question

Alan Tolchinsky

>That's wierd Ron. I was just looking at the hard drive. You must have ESP. Thanks!

Re: O.T. Computer back up question

David

>You've got a bunch of choices. The easiest if you have a dvd burner is to save them the old fashion way. If you use a dvd-rw you can write over files as you continue to back up your files. If you don't use an rw you'll have to create a new disk each time. Note that dvds and cds don't last forever so you'll have to keep doing it.

You can also get an external hard drive that plugs into the usb port. Another version of this is a thing called a one-button back up box. You put a regular hard drive in it and plug it into your usb port. After loading the software, like the name says, hit the button and it backs up your drive.

FWIW I do both. Some of the folks I work with back up onto thumb drives too.

DGW

Re: O.T. Computer back up question

Ron in Drums PA

>I picked one up a few weeks ago. It's as fast and at 250G it's great for extra storage.

Yeah, but

Larry Marker in Alabama

>Those things don't have a proven reliability track record. Take a hard look at the warranty. I've seen many with a one year guarantee while the same vendor's internal drive of comprable specs often has 3 years. Makes me think the vendor doesn't trust those externals to last.

If you are wanting to keep things that are really important to you like family pictures, valuable financial data, or the like, I would urge you to really think hard about a DVD burner and saving these files to a DVD. They are pretty cheap and should last a long time if you store the DVDs where they don't get physically abused, wet, or too hot.

Just my $0.02.

Larry

Ghost it

Dustmaker Mike

>I use a USB 2.5 inch drive in an external case (no power required USB Bus Powered) I got from www.newegg.com I then run Norton Ghost and Clone the drive every week. If the drive in the laptop crashes I have a second drive ready to slide in and take over. I travel a little around the world some times and this the only way to go. I also have the important informatio on CD, DVD and a Thumb Drive just in case I get some place that I need it. I also carry two thumb drives with the same information and both are locked.

Re: O.T. Computer back up question

Don Henthorn

>I guess you don't have to worry whather it is IDE or sata if you use a usb one. Is that correct?

Yeah, but but

Dustmaker Mike

>A sliver DVD or CD has a 5 year life while a Gold has a 20+ year life. But no one is sure yet because the media has not been around that long. If it is important back it up to several different medias and keep them safe.

I seem to remember an 8 inch floppy then a 5.25 then a 3.5 inch floppy all being the means to backup and save data oh almost forgot the ZIP drives, and the Magnito Optical drive (Medical Equipment) and the Tape drives.

Data that is important should be backed up several different ways to ensure you will be able to retrieve it in the future. How many folks still have data on 3.5 inch disk and still have a 3.5 inch disk in there computer?

That would be correct.

Dustmaker Mike

>

Re: O.T. Computer back up question

Ron in Drums PA

>That's right, just plug it into a usb drive and its ready to use.

You're right

Ron in Drums PA

>

Super geeky backup option

wilbur

>This requires knowing how to muck around in Linux, or knowing someone that does. But I think this provides the best backup system in terms of safety.

Take an old computer you aren't using, install Linux and at least 3 hard drives of your choice. Then set up a software RAID5 system with LVM.

RAID5 is a way of storing data on multiple hard drives in a way that if you lose one hard drive in a crash, the other drives have data saved so that if you replace that drive with a new one, the data gets restored automagically. The downside of RAID5 is that your storage space is the total of all your hard drives minus one. So if you have 4 250 GB hard drives, you've got 750 GB of total storage space.

(If you're keeping score at home, RAID0 just combines two hard drives into one big one. Lose one hard drive and you lose all your data. RAID1 makes a mirror image of one hard drive onto another. Lose one drive, and the other serves as a backup, but you lose anything that happened since the last mirroring operation.)

LVM is a way of making your computer think that your multiple hard drives are acting like one big hard drive.

This is complicated to set up, but once it's running, it's pretty painless. It's definitely not for everyone, but it is a very safe way to keep data.

The nice thing is that it is a very low cost solution. My Linux fileserver is on an old Pentium 3 computer that's 9 years old. 250 GB hard drives are easily less than $100. So for less than $500 and an old unused computer, you can have 1000 GB (5 250 GB hard drives minus one) of self backing up disc storage.

Got Tape and 5-1/4 Floppies, Too. Flash?

Robert Hutchins

>but no drives to read them on.

Yours is VERY wise counsel. I've got some very hard won family history information on 5-1/4" media and need to find someone to transfer it for me.

While we're on this subject, what is the skinny on flash drives expected life expectancy and the relative fragility of the medium? I've seen 5 or 10 GB flash offered and expect those data densities to increase and get cheaper. Without moving parts, one would expect their life to be much longer than media that have them.

WARNING: WAR STORY IMMINENT !

Back when I was a professional IT puke, our local management chapter sponsored Capt. Grace Hopper, USN - later to be Admiral Grace Hopper, the only female admiral yet in the US Navy - to speak at one of our meetings (google that name and read about an amazing person - Mother COBOL and the reason software was made platform portable and claimant to having invented the term software "bug"). This was in the day of giant mainframes and very expensive but limited capacity disk drives. I think our tape media densities were 6250 bits per inch at the time. Her topic was microprocessors and data densities and how they would evolve over time. She predicted the PC long before it came (early '70s) and said that data would eventually be stored on the atomic structure of media to achieve the greatest information density. She even postulated that stainless steel would be the likely material due to the regularity/predictability of its atomic structure (not a metallurgist nor data scientist; so take this as a hearsay).

DAMN I'M OLD!

Re: O.T. Computer back up question

Alan Tolchinsky

>Thanks guys, It looks like no one single device can do it all. It sounds like an external HD is convenient but DVD storage may be a more long term solution. But also nothing lasts forever i.e. a definite life span for DVD's. Thanks again for the help.

Re: Got 5-1/4 Floppies Solution, Bob

Carol from AZ

>Hey Bob,

I got a USB floppy drive off Ebay a while ago for just that purpose. Was cheap and worked well, slow but well. :)

Thanks, Carol!

Robert Hutchins

>Didn't know they made a 5-1/4" USB floppy drive. I'll look into it.

Re: Got Tape and 5-1/4 Floppies, Too. Flash?

Denis Ch�nard, Orl�ans, Ont.

>Howdy Bob!

I was in the same situation not too long ago, with a bunch of 5 1/4" floppies to transfer (those dated back to university, 20+ years ago).

I lucked out... My MIL still used a 386 for whatever little word processing she was doing (using WP 5.1 for DOS, no fancy Windows stuff...), and the PC had both floppy sizes... Took a few hours to transfer everything, but I now have that thing off my back :-)

Funny how computers have become orders of magnitude faster... I used dBase III+ 20+ years ago, and it would take about a minute to load on the original IBM PC (using floppies, of course). Now with a now basically old machine (Athlon 2100) the same software starts instantly, no delays whatsoever. And yes, it runs flawlessly in a DOS window under Windows 2000...

I think I'm getting old too...

DC

Re: Super geeky backup option

John McGaw

>Which is all fine until the fire which destroys the original and the backup machines or the thief who takes both of them. I have homebrew server in the basement holding five 400gB drives but that is just for convenience and I don't consider it a true backup.

Re: O.T. Computer back up question

John McGaw

>My take on it is that to be a true backup it cannot be in the vicinity of the original otherwise any disaster which befalls one may hit both -- think fire, tornado, flood, hurricane, theft. For that reason a backup must be off-premises and must be in a safe location.

Personally, I use three 200gB USB external drives which I built just for backup purposes. The most recent drive holds the current backup files and is always stored in my bank's vault. Given the small amount of data you have to deal with, you could probably get away with burning the material to DVD and storing the results in your safe deposit box. If you do this I'd suggest that you use the best quality DVD writable disks you can obtain, VERIFY the contents after writing, and NEVER trust your irreplaceable files to R/W disks. I use Taiyo Yuden exclusively and in bulk I probably only pay $0.35 for each of them.

Re: Got Tape and 5-1/4 Floppies, Too. Flash?

Ron in Drums PA

>My first system used a cassette tape drive. I forget the model# but the computer was made by TI. 20 minutes to load a 4k program into a computer that had 16k worth on memory. About 8k of that was DOS

My first floppy drive held a whopping 160k "5-1/4 ". I remember thinking it was like magic how many programs one could store on a single floppy.

Thinking back, that single floppy held as many programs then as my 120HD on my laptop does today.

Re: O.T. Computer back up question

Bill Howatt

>I want to second the comment not to use R/W DVDs. I have had them fail long, long before their quoted lifetime. Always verify after burning because even with good media there might be a dud in the batch.

I consider DVDs to be at the bottom of the media pile for backup reliability, especially long-term although I must admit I have read data CDs that were about 7 yrs old. My backups are a second HD in the machine and then a copy on a USB drive. I tend to let the copies accummulate so I have more than just the most recent one.

I do write selected backups to DVDs and keep a DVD copy at a neighbours house. I told him if I come looking for them, I either have been robbed of all my computer equipment or my house burned down.

Recently saw a TV program talking about backups and a lot of pros recommend using HDs for long-term storage rather than DVDs - just put them on the shelf, FWIW.

The wrinkle, as mentioned previously, is that the media not only has to be intact but you have to have the technology available that is still capable of reading the media. This is why I think that even though there are more events in life being recorded by digital cameras there may actually be a lower percentage of it available 80 yrs later compared to the print/negative technology.

Another comment I have on backing up data files such as photos, spreadsheets, letters and the like is to use a plain copy technique either all the time or at suitable intervals. Using a backup program the dumps the files into a large compressed container is fine but like the hardware technology problem you have to be sure you have the program that will extract your files from the container in the future. Also, a small flaw in such a container file may well render the entire contents unreadable.

I use True Image for making images of my C drive which has no important data files whatsoever stored on it. I do not believe mixing the OS with the data. I run full and incrementals with BackupMyPC which does result in a proprietary container file but I plain-copy the data files to backup media every month or two.

Bill