DescentBB

I've got a new closet to worry about and keep organized, my digital closet. I was just ripping some old LP's and CD's so that I could convert the music to other formats to play on modern equipment and decided to back the files up on a flash drive. I went to look at the space left to see if I had enough for the music files and I only had 567 megs left out of the original 8G's! I NEED MORE SPACE for my digital stuff! Between games, patches, documents, pictures, video and now music, I've got a lot of crap! Now I've got to store it somewhere safe or lose it!

Before computers, my stuff usually filled up physical space that required storage somewhere. My CD collection fills up one wall (no player either, my old CD player died and the cassette tape and phono players are just as old). But at least I could always could find my junk again, unless I'd thrown it out somewhere in the past. Now, though, if you don't regularly back up your digital information, it's very easy to lose and it's not always an easy task to retrieve it in the future when you want it. It can go bye, bye in an instant with just one screeeeeech of the hard drive! Then there's format changes that make things interesting too. What's a person to do? I'll need more storage, that's for sure! What does everyone else do with their digital 'stuff'?

External backup. Burn to dual layer DVD

External HDs are good too.

I've got a NAS drive setup and a DVD burner too, which I use regularly. DVD burning take time though. The flash drive sticks are quick and handy. I burn DVD copies when I'm to the point of not altering the data I want to keep. Even the NAS drive is filling up. But neither is a really long term solution. Hard drives can fail and burnable DVD's can rot over time if stored improperly. I guess I'm guess I'm an old fuddy duddy and want something more permanent feeling. Data collection feeds storage expansion, especially if you have more than 1 computer and a media player! Not something I had to worry about just 20 years ago.

Honestly though TC. Media changes rapidly enough that burning to a DVD is good enough. If properly stored (as true archives should be) it won't be a problem. Just recopy the media every 5 years or so and you'll be good. Bottom line: There is no \"Fail Safe\" solution. Anything on which you store your data can, under various circumstances, be damaged and lost.


Redundancy is you best allie. Burn them off on several DVD's by a couple different reputable manufacturers. DO NOT use Fry's cheap-o knock-offs. (for example)Spend some money.

Also, if you want to be really anal, you need to think about physical destruction/theft of your backups. You don't have a real high quality backup system unless it's physically stored in a different location.

I've meant to take some DVD's over to my parent's for a while now, and just haven't gotten to it.

(I usually get the bug to update my backups about once a year... much less than the life of the disks.)

I'm with snoopy.

At my house we have two large external usb drives just for backup purposes. We back everything up onto drive 1, and then place it in the safety deposit box. For the next month or so we make backups onto drive 2, then next time we are heading into town we take drive 2 into the back, put it into the safety deposit box and bring back drive 1. Lather Rinse Repeat.

We also have 8gig flash drives attached to our computers that we make \"quick\" backups onto every day. Just of the most important stuff that changes most frequently.

Here's what I use: Mozy Online Backup

2gb per computer free or
$5/month for unlimited space per computer

Been using it for a couple years now- fast, automatic, easy, works well

What I'm using now:

Windows Home Server

It's essentially a full MS Server 2003 Business OS + auto-backups + file/media-sharing + central remote access point + numerous plugins. For what you get, it's cheap!

I built mine out of an old Pentium4 machine; setting it up is REALLY easy. It's currently backing up my whole network on a nightly basis, and serving as my fileshare/ftp/web/games server. I highly recommend it.

I use SpiderOak online backup (supports linux and unlimited users). That backs up my main documents and email. Then I have a linux box which pulls the same files and archives in a tarball. Once a week I do a Norton Ghost full image backup onto an external drive which is then stored in a fireproof safe (this one has saved me a couple times).

For things like media, whenever I fill up an SD card, I file the data on my linux box, and put the SD card in an SD wallet, and put that in the safe too.

I will say that I think you guys are nuts.

I have my home folder backed up on a second internal drive. Like I mentioned earlier, about once a year I'll burn some DVD's.

Other than that, if it gets stolen/burned, it's gone.

snoopy wrote:I will say that I think you guys are nuts.

I have my home folder backed up on a second internal drive. Like I mentioned earlier, about once a year I'll burn some DVD's.

Other than that, if it gets stolen/burned, it's gone.

They always say: There's 2 types of people- Those who have lost data and those who will.

Since I fall under the first category, I can tell you from my own experience that what you are doing is insufficient (since that's similar to what I did before I lost data...). Burning DVDs once every year won't help if the file you lost was modified last week.

Duper wrote:Honestly though TC. Media changes rapidly enough that burning to a DVD is good enough. If properly stored (as true archives should be) it won't be a problem. Just recopy the media every 5 years or so and you'll be good. Bottom line: There is no "Fail Safe" solution. Anything on which you store your data can, under various circumstances, be damaged and lost.


Redundancy is you best allie. Burn them off on several DVD's by a couple different reputable manufacturers. DO NOT use Fry's cheap-o knock-offs. (for example)Spend some money.

Yeah, I'm going to burn a couple of DVD's when I finally get done with the CD ripping to store the original files, as long as those can still be accessed in the future by some other system or software. I already paid for the CD's at one time, so I don't want to pay AGAIN to download any of it if I don't have to. All my other accumulated over time important files are on DVD's, flash memory sticks and the NAS drive. It just seems clunky though and easy to physically lose.

Right now I'm just storing the files I'm creating on 2 different computers (one has the editing software on it) and large capacity flash memory sticks because those things write out very fast. And no, I'm NOT going to use cheapie Fry's disks nor am I going to use Blu-Ray disks just yet, too new of a format still.

I just worry about long term retrieval and storage. Some of my data is no longer around for access any more if I lost it. It just strikes me funny that 'digital bits' have become something that you would not want to lose. I never worried about it in years past, but now these 'bits' have become necessary for modern existence. I'm so dependent on data nowadays that with format changes and internet rot, things tend to disappear and cause me no end of grief. How could little invisible ones and zeros you can't even touch be so important? It just seems so surreal.

Hey Foil, thanks for the Home Sever suggestion. We've been looking at building one, our data closets are getting full (the NAS drive has only 2 500 Gig drives in it) and cumbersome (memory sticks and DVD's). How old of a system can you use as a base to start with for a build?

tunnelcat wrote:Hey Foil, thanks for the Home Sever suggestion. ... How old of a system can you use as a base to start with for a build?

According to the specs:

Minimum System Requirements

• Computer with 1 GHz Pentium III (or equivalent) or faster processor
• 512 MB RAM or more
• 70 GB or larger ATA, SATA, or SCSI hard drive as the primary hard drive
• 100 Mbps or faster Ethernet network interface card and wired network connection
• Internal or external DVD drive (the home server must be capable of booting from this drive)
• A router/firewall device with DHCP enabled
• VGA or higher-resolution monitor (needed only during initial home server installation)
• Keyboard and mouse (needed only during initial home server installation)

I can tell you that it runs really quickly on the old P4 I'm using (though I added a bit more RAM).

Damn, I've only got 256 MB Ram and a 733 MHz Pentium 3 in the thing and it's noisy as all get out, so it's not a candidate for surgery. Oh well, so much for that. We still like the server idea though. We'll find something newer.

Foil wrote:What I'm using now:

Windows Home Server

It's essentially a full MS Server 2003 Business OS + auto-backups + file/media-sharing + central remote access point + numerous plugins. For what you get, it's cheap!

I built mine out of an old Pentium4 machine; setting it up is REALLY easy. It's currently backing up my whole network on a nightly basis, and serving as my fileshare/ftp/web/games server. I highly recommend it.

FreeNAS > windows home server

Ferno wrote:FreeNAS > windows home server

Hmmm... That sounds like a good idea. Have to play around with that sometime.

Ferno, Is that a product that can a linked in the Awesome Free Software thread?

Ferno wrote:FreeNAS > windows home server

True, if you're just looking for straight backup/storage.

it does a lot more than just straight backup.

it's usually a good idea to use google to pull up the site and see the screenshots there, foil.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/gallery/fre ... _itemId=15

\"cloud\" storage makes me nervous. It means I'm trusting my data to someone else. Probably safe, yes, but I'm paranoid. External USB drives are cheap, you can get a terabyte for less than a hundred bucks now. And they are easier to use, more reliable, and hold more than a dvd. And I don't have to worry about the company thats holding my data going under tomorrow and losing everything I've stored there.

Not the most rational view, clearly paranoid. Perhaps my meds are off.

Yeah, I'm using WHS as well... MOST things work pretty well, although I've had some issues with password synchronisation making a nuisance of itself. It should theoretically be possible to fix that, but I'm still working on it...

It's not recommended, but WHS also works well if you need to run server software on something... not that you generally need anything special to do that, but a dedicated NAS wouldn't be able to.

You guys got me thinking about my backups.

I'm buying some flash sticks to create backups on. Anyone know of a convenient program I can use to pre-select folders to be backed up, and have it intelligently update/upload changed files when I insert the stick? (Something for Vista, and something for Linux would be ideal.)

Kilarin wrote:"cloud" storage makes me nervous. It means I'm trusting my data to someone else. Probably safe, yes, but I'm paranoid. External USB drives are cheap, you can get a terabyte for less than a hundred bucks now. And they are easier to use, more reliable, and hold more than a dvd. And I don't have to worry about the company thats holding my data going under tomorrow and losing everything I've stored there.

Not the most rational view, clearly paranoid. Perhaps my meds are off.

Services like Spideroak encrypt the data, and allow it so that only people viewing it under my account name can view it. I suppose they could be lying about it... but I doubt it.

thenior wrote:I suppose they could be lying about it... but I doubt it.

And you are PROBABLY right. Besides, you could always encrypt before upload, thereby ensuring your data is safe from unethical prying. BUT, that only answers one part of my paranoia. The other part is what happens if the cloud sponsor goes bankrupt and shuts down all of there servers tomorrow?

snoopy wrote:You guys got me thinking about my backups.

I'm buying some flash sticks to create backups on. Anyone know of a convenient program I can use to pre-select folders to be backed up, and have it intelligently update/upload changed files when I insert the stick? (Something for Vista, and something for Linux would be ideal.)

I don't have any special software to backup files and folders, although I think that there's something available for that task. What I did was create several dated directory trees for the important files I want to keep, store all the month's files in that month's particular folder and then do regular back ups once a month of JUST that month's contents. That way I don't have to keep backing up already stored data and filling up memory sticks or DVD's with redundant data. Sometimes I'll back a large file up right away if I'm worried. I also don't change or overwrite any older stored files because you never know when you want access an older unaltered version.

Office Max is having a sale on the SanDisk Cruzer Flash Drive at the moment. You can get a 16G for $39.95 or an 8G for $20.00. If you use these things, I would run the uninstall the U3 software option. Then when you're doing backups, you just plug the stick into a USB port without the annoying 3rd party startup software launch and copy the files onto the stick via Windows Explorer, much simpler. However, it's all for naught if you lose the stick!

snoopy wrote:You guys got me thinking about my backups.

I'm buying some flash sticks to create backups on. Anyone know of a convenient program I can use to pre-select folders to be backed up, and have it intelligently update/upload changed files when I insert the stick? (Something for Vista, and something for Linux would be ideal.)

It seems a bit awkward, but there might be a source-control app that would do the trick. Set up correctly with your stick as the root 'working folder', just have it 'pull' changed files.

...Kinda out there, but it's an idea.

You could setup a linux box that looks for files with a different modified time stamp than the one it stored. Probably could write a windows batch file to do the same thing.

A Windows batch file can easily do that (check out the parameters for the XCOPY command).

If the command is ran from the stick (and not from the computer's hard drive) you can configure the commands so that it doesn't care what drive letter the stick is, only the location on the computer's hard drive that you're getting files to/from.

I use this kind of method for quick and simple file backups on couple of the systems I use. Here's an example of the command:
The quote marks around the sourcepath allow for correct handling of directories and files that have spaces in the names.

Check out the new batch command:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy

I've got a batch job scheduled to run during lunch every day at work that copies my most important C drive files from my laptop to the network home drive using robocopy. that way if my laptop suddenly caught on fire, I'd still have a backup on the network.