[Dark Age Iron Savior]

Topic title. Kind of a simple question. Think....lots of stuff to back up. Lots. Current burning resources are a CD writer, but might have access to a DVD writer through a network connection, not sure.

Please? Thank you.

[Hot Stott Bot]

Two hard drives, RAID1.

Uuh if this is a postmortem "save it all" scenario I guess burn it to DVD?

But, in general, if there's stuff you care about on a hard drive, you should keep two hard drives and mirror them (RAID1) and then when shit starts breaking you won't lose anything.

[Broco]

RAID1 has the advantage that once installed, you don't need to remember to perform any additional regular work. But it was designed for uptime reliability, not backupping, so it only provides partial protection. In particular, if one of the hard drives starts getting corrupted instead of suddenly failing, the corruption can spread to the other hard drive. It is preferable to get another hard drive, then perform regular copies with a tool like SyncBackSE (what I use, though it's not free unfortunately).

[Martial Loh]

i've lost faith in cds and dvds. possibly because i used to use really crappy branded media.
These days I throw everything I want to archive onto a portable hard drive. If something's really important, I'll bring a backup to my office computer & also make a copy of it on my Creative Zen.

[wourme]

I've been using Amazon S3 for the past year or so. With the free JungleDisk program, it's very easy (and cheap--15 cents per GB per month) to back things up.

[chevluh]

External hard drives for me too.

[extrabastardformula]

Upload to remote server.
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[sarsamis]

I use a 300 GB external harddrive.

[Duckzero]

rsync and I backup my home directories on mozy and a local server.

Automation for the win!
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Keepin' it real like Oatmeal

[BenoitRen]

I back up all my data to a CD-RW. Last time I had to use a second one for backing up a collection of SeaMonkey nightly builds I had decided to keep, though.
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[kf]

tape drives, my brothers.
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[falsedan]

DAIS what are your requirements? How much data are you going to back up, how quickly will you need to access backups, how long do you want backups to take, how long do you want to keep backups, what is your budget?

RAID1 for backups is considered harmful; it guards against single hardware failure and not catastrophic failures like a bum IDE/SATA controller or atmospheric static strikes or power surges or burglary or wobbly coffee cups.

External HDDs can be removed and stored remotely & securely, but they are not tolerant of physical abuse so have to be handed gently. My 40GB iPod was my external HDD for a while but I didn't treat it with respect and it died.

CDs/DVDs are cheap and easy but are inconvenient for large data stores (like 100GB+). Delta backups make each backup smaller but then require more work to re-create the data when you want to restore it. Plus some CDRs have been shown to degrade over time so they may not be readable after 30 years.

Enterprise systems usually have data backed up nightly onto high-availability spinning media, then moved to slower media (like tape) after a few days, then wipe & reuse tapes after a few months.

Basically if what you want to keep safe is of high value to you but isn't frequently accessed, burn to CD/DVD and freshen the disks every 5-10 years, unless multiple disks are too inconvenient , then buy a new HDD periodically and stuff it in a drawer in a safe.

If your stuff is highly volatile and you often need to see versions from a couple of days ago, then tapes are your friend! Expensive initially, then incredibly cheap per GB, kinda slow but bearable restores. If you only require one previous version kept, then an external HDD is the go.
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[falsedan]

oh yeah I don't back up anything since I have no worthwhile data that couldn't just be redownloaded from the internet with 2-3 weeks of work
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[showka]

I use two external 450 GB hard drives, one which lives next to my laptop and the other which I keep in an entirely different location. I should sync them more often than I do but its kind of a pain in the ass, plus when I transport one of them I feel uneasy.

I use a pretty simply C# app I wrote that recursively copies files and keeps the file created / access / modified timestamps the same. I was thinking of making improvements so it only overwrites existing files when the time information is more recent.

For the laptop itself I copy the files to the external hard drives this way as well, but I also back up the primary (pre-installed, with no accompanying DVD) Windows partition in Ubuntu using some program I can't recall. That's because Ubuntu can be booted off a CD, so using this program seemed like a better idea that going with a stolen version of Ghost or something.