Backup Possibilities?

[Brent]

I'm usually the one answering these kinda questions, but I'm stumped, heh.

On my server I have 2.25 TB of storage total, it is very full, some of the drives are completely full. I want to backup all my stuff, but putting all of that on 8 GB DVDs will take a LOT of DVDs. Blu-Ray is an obvious answer, but even at 40 or 50 GB a disc that is still a lot of discs, and Blu-Ray is very expensive still.

I have 3 250 GB hard drives, 3 400 GB hard drives, and 1 300 GB hard drive I want to backup.

What is a cheap way to do this?

My ultimate ultimate upgrade way down the line is most likely going to be a huge RAID 6 array, but I'm not there yet, it will take quite a while to get all the hard drives I need for that kind of a setup, so for now, I just need some external means of backing up.

[RoscoPColtrane]

My only thoughts are to bite the bullet with the blueray (lots of disks), take off from work and do it via DVD (tons of disks) or upgrade now.....

:( :( :(

[RoscoPColtrane]

OH yeah, i just got a 250 GIG external HDD from circuit city. I shopped at Best Buy too and they had 1 Tera externals for semi cheap....might be an option, then you only need 3 of those...

[Brent]

Sweet, can you recal what the price was at Best Buy for the 1 TB external? It's probably just two 500 GB drives internal I bet.

[Unholy]

Sweet, can you recal what the price was at Best Buy for the 1 TB external? It's probably just two 500 GB drives internal I bet.

Well checking their site it seems to be a Western Digital My Book™ Pro Edition™ II (http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?sku=A0732045&cs=04&c=us&l=en) which as you suspected is just 2x 500GB drives. You can maybe buy two of those or maybe 3 Seagate 750GB USB 2.0/FireWire 400 Externals. (http://shop1.outpost.com/product/4882800;jsessionid=wvdrUgd-H1Y7AhJgMVPTCA**.node3?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG)

[Shagster]

500Gb seagate external for $140.00...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148235

How big would that 2.5Gb be compressed?

[RoscoPColtrane]

The external HDD i just purchased is a seagate, it has 5 times the warantee of the WD, which in my opinion is a good thing! :thumb:

ALso what software do you use to backup?

[Brent]

The external HDD i just purchased is a seagate, it has 5 times the warantee of the WD, which in my opinion is a good thing! :thumb:

ALso what software do you use to backup?

That's another thread, heh, I've got Nero Ultimate which has a hard drive backing up utility.

What's a good one though?

[YeOldeStonecat]

My ultimate ultimate upgrade way down the line is most likely going to be a huge RAID 6 array, but I'm not there yet, it will take quite a while to get all the hard drives I need for that kind of a setup, so for now, I just need some external means of backing up.

Double parity RAID is less efficient, performance wise, against RAID 5..when used in smaller setups. Due to the increased overhead. The advantage of it is being able to survive dual drive failure....the likely hood of dual drives failing at once is really only an increased probability in large RAID arrays consisting of many drives (IE 10 or more)

You're in a common bind that many people and smaller businesses are in....large amounts of data to backup, yet how to keep it on a smaller budget.

Tape drives? Very expensive, and painfully slow for lots of data.

Removable disk drives..such as Iomega REV (70/140 gig) or Dell PowerVault RD1000 (up to 160/320 gigs)...middle of the road price wise, fairly fast, mid-range capacity. These give you the advantage of "removable media"...and you can span backups over several removable medias with your backup software. I've been using the PowerVault RD1000 lately for some clients....instead of a tape cartridge, or even a removal disk like an Iomega Zip or REV drive...it's a removable laptop SATA drive in a cartridge.


I don't trust and will never support burning to CD's for backup..seen it fail on people when needing to restore. As I'm sure we've all seen...sometimes you make coasters when copying data to a CD.

USB drives is an economical means....you just lose some automation in backup..have to do things manually. For "once a month" stuff..should suffice.

Could always make yourself a budget NAS box to backup to...
http://www.freenas.org/

[YARDofSTUF]

Hitachi is now shipping a 1TB drive...

I think the NAS idea sounds good too.

Really no cheap solution.

[Roody]

Don't really have a solution other then the ones mentioned here. Out of curiousity Brent I would love to see the inside of your server. Do you by any chance have pics available?

[Shagster]

You could also (bite the bullet) get three or four Seagate 750Gb drives and make your current drives the backup.

[Rivas]

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2949