New Hard Drives... now need reliable back-up.

[Worf101]

I just converted to 2 74 Gig Raptors in Raid 0. Now I'd like to have some sort of back up that's quick, easy and reliable. So now I've a couple of questions of you experts.

1. External backups?
2. How are they connected and how often to back up?
3. Ghost on a flash medium of some sort?
4. Tape back ups? Or am I dating myself with this one?

Any suggestions gladly welcomed.

Da Worfster

 

[Hawkeye22]

I use True Image 9. I sheduled it to image my drives weekly, keeping the last 3 copies. It stores the image on another computer on my network. I used to use Ghost, but TI allows you to image drives while in windows. The rescue boot CD had no problems detecing machines on the network or the nvidia nforce4 raid controller. TI can also do incremental and differential backups & images.

You can try the trial version for 15 days and it's fully functional.

 

[Worf101]

Depends on how much you want to spend.

3x250GB in RAID5 is what I use for backup if you're willing to go that far.

Something reasonable about $150 to $200 dollars at the most. I'm wholly infamiliar with this so I've no idea how much it is for decent security.

Da Worfster

 

[HermDawg]

What kind of backups are you looking to do? Do you just want to backup just some data or do you want to have backup images for disaster recovery if one of the drive fails?

In either case I would get an external hard drive either USB 2.0 or Fireware and use that for backups. An external hard drive is much faster and cheaper than tapes. You can get a Western Digital External 250GB for $141 on Newegg. But if I were you I'd go for the 320GB for $185.

For plain data backups just use the Backup utility built into XP (I'm assuming you are using WinXP). If you want full image backup either use Ghost or True Image. Schedule backups as you see fit. For my computer I schedule nightly data backups, and I have a weekly Ghost backup for distaster recovery.

 

[Worf101]

Thanks folks that's exactly the kind of information I was looking for. I'll go with a WD external with True Image in about a month or so. I'm looking to do full HD all data backups so if a drive fails I'll never be stuck again like I was.

Da Worfster