Question for the people who use external hard drives for backup... (DVD, monitor)
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A question for the people who use external hard drives for backup of your PCs: does it concern you at all that when your external hard drive used for backup reaches full capacity, that usually the oldest backup set(s) are deleted to make room, for newer backups? (Also assuming that my existing present understanding of ext. HDD backup is correct, and still current.) Also, have you ever been in a situation where you needed the oldest backup sets, after they had already been deleted?
I did a quick search online to see what backup methods are the most popular with PC users, and by far and away, it seemed like external hard drives was the favorite way, followed by cloud backup, if I am hopefully remembering correctly. Backing up to optical disks such as DL-DVD+/-R, and 25/50/100/128 GB BD-R discs, seemed to be one of the least favorite methods.
I don't use cloud backup b/c, to be honest, I don't really trust the cloud vendors, and don't want to be dependent on or locked into them, and I have heard that doing a restore from the cloud can be very time-consuming. I almost never back up to external hard disk because of the older backup set deletion issue, as cited above. My own favorite method is to back up to 100/128 GB BDXL discs, because you can essentially keep a backup set perpetually, without worrying about whether it is so old that it is automatically deleted, and you can span multiple discs as needed, while still having a relatively large capacity per disc. BDXL discs used to be very expensive, but costs have gone down and so these days, you can buy a 100 GB BDXL disc for around $35 USD.
1. Full bootable image every night. One copy. The latest. This is protect me from an internal hard drive failure. I have used SuperDuper! for 7 years.
2. Incremental backup of data files every 3 hours. This is let me retrieve a file when I accidently delete/mess-up that single file. I find that I retrieve one of these files about every 3 months. I use Time Machine.
Every few years, I buy a new larger backup drive as I have more "stuff" and the price of drives keeps falling.
1. Full bootable image every night. One copy. The latest. This is protect me from an internal hard drive failure. I have used SuperDuper! for 7 years.
2. Incremental backup of data files every 3 hours. This is let me retrieve a file when I accidently delete/mess-up that single file. I find that I retrieve one of these files about every 3 months. I use Time Machine.
Every few years, I buy a new larger backup drive as I have more "stuff" and the price of drives keeps falling.
We do something similar, but merged together.
Full image (bootable where applicable) of each drive in each machine nightly. We keep 4 daily, 4 weekly, and 2 monthly of these. This is all handled by Windows Home Server. The single exception to this, is our media server, where I don't back up the drive that contains ripped copies of our DVD collection. While I'd rather not re-rip them, it's a lot of data to dump onto the server.
I work in VMWare all day, and my main image is set to take an auto protect snapshot twice a day, and keep a 2 day / 2 week / 2 month set of snapshots.
Backing up to disk is very tedious—and you’re left with a mountain of disks that you’ll probably never use again. Is there a particular reason why you would need old backups? You could get at 3TB external hard drive. With that much storage, it would be a very long time before you started to overwrite files.
I use a 1TB external hard drive for my backup plus I save all of my documents to Dropbox. I’m an Apple user so all of my media are already in the cloud to sync with my Mac, iPhone and iPad.
Is there a particular reason why you would need old backups?
The book you have been working on for 10 years somehow becomes corrupted on your main machine and you lose 300 pages in the middle. 3 weeks later you notice your 300 pages are missing but if your backup is a newer copy of the file on your hard drive your backup is no better than the main file.
I don't back anything up, and I shut down my computer while all my unsaved work is open and try to save it all before Windows forces the app closed. I live on the edge
The book you have been working on for 10 years somehow becomes corrupted on your main machine and you lose 300 pages in the middle. 3 weeks later you notice your 300 pages are missing but if your backup is a newer copy of the file on your hard drive your backup is no better than the main file.
For constantly changing files (especially irreplaceable ones), a version control system is one of the better ways of handling this. In software development we have thousands of files (mostly text) that can change hundreds of times a week (or a day). Even on single user projects, I use SVN (hosted outside of my house / office) and commit work at least daily, providing the ability to go back to any prior version at any time.
For constantly changing files (especially irreplaceable ones), a version control system is one of the better ways of handling this. In software development we have thousands of files (mostly text) that can change hundreds of times a week (or a day). Even on single user projects, I use SVN (hosted outside of my house / office) and commit work at least daily, providing the ability to go back to any prior version at any time.
I agree. I’m a composer and use versions for all of my music. I don’t know what the Windows backup systems are like, but Time Machine for Mac does an initial backup of the whole system, including applications, but then only backs up changed files—which take up much less space. A 1TB hard drive can hold at least a years worth of backups because the amount of new or changed data is comparatively small.
Backing up to disk is very tedious—and you’re left with a mountain of disks that you’ll probably never use again.
True and certainly a valid point, if for example you have several terabytes of data that are being stored. In my own personal case, I store all of my important documents, files, e-mails, and purchased music and software that I have bought on a dedicated 1 TB external hard drive, of which 333 GB has been used out of 1 TB total space. I was able to successfully back up the 333 GB of data to three (3) 100/128 GB BD-R discs. The only real downside was that it took me ~10 hours, to actually complete the backup job. You are 100% correct that if I had used 25 GB or 50 GB BD-R discs, it would have required *a lot* more disc usage
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Is there a particular reason why you would need old backups? You could get at 3TB external hard drive. With that much storage, it would be a very long time before you started to overwrite files.
Well you see, every time I do a backup, I always use the full image backup option, to provide maximum recoverability of the data, should something bad happen. I usually only image C:\ drive when I have installed something major on it, such as a new Microsoft Office installation, or an important OS service pack release, or say before I am going to perform an OS upgrade. That way, if C:\ drive gets corrupted beyond repair, I just restore to my latest image, and download the latest security and AV updates received since the image was taken -- everything else remains intact.
For my ext. HDD with important files/e-mails/document/purchased software and music/etc., I will typically try to back it up at least quarterly every year, again using the full image option. I would ideally like to back up more frequently than this, but the cost of doing so is rather prohibitive. I guess that the main reason I don't use an ext. HDD to store the backups is, if I run a full-image backup every time on a ~300 GB using a 3 TB ext. HDD, I would get about 9-10 backups out of it, before I would have buy a new ext. HDD, and if I'm not careful and don't actively monitor the automatic backups, I could potentially lose an important oldest backup set(s).
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I use a 1TB external hard drive for my backup plus I save all of my documents to Dropbox. I’m an Apple user so all of my media are already in the cloud to sync with my Mac, iPhone and iPad.
For my ext. HDD with important files/e-mails/document/purchased software and music/etc., I will typically try to back it up at least quarterly every year, again using the full image option. I would ideally like to back up more frequently than this, but the cost of doing so is rather prohibitive.
A quarterly backup is better than nothing, but I prefer something more frequent. I suppose it’s whether you’re more concerned about the documents or the system. I’m a composer so documents are everything. I can always replace software but it’s catastrophic to lose an entire opera.
I spilled water on my Mac Book Pro and had to replace it a couple of months ago. Fortunately I had my external hard drive plugged in at the time. Time Machine installed all of my documents, apps, etc., exactly as they were on my old machine.
Evidently the new File History feature in Windows 8 is very similar to Time Machine for Mac. Have you tried it?
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Two types of "backup"
