Are you backing up your digital collection ? - Page 6

I just got a 2TB external Western Digital Essentials drive from Amazon and I like it a lot. Currently copying all my music over to it and says 4 hours to go... time to play some Dead Space 2 while I wait.

Quote:

Originally Posted by estreeter 

Yep, incremental backups make a lot more sense than 'scratch' backups. Run Linux and the chances that you are backing up anything malevolent are very slim (certainly not 'zero' as some of the zealots would have you believe tho). Linux really is tailor made for storage wonks but personally I couldnt be bothered endlessly tinkering with 10,000+ line Perl scripts simply to ensure that I have a valid backup.

 

 

No 10,000 line Perl script required.  There is a utility called rsync (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync) that is included in Linux distro's that can accomplish a full incremental back up in one line.  I wrote a shell script that includes four lines that make calls to RSync to backup my data from my internal 1TB drives onto a WD Essentials 2TB external drive attached to my Linux server.  The initial backup took a looonnnnggg time, but the incrementals for music and pictures that I add here and there take no time at all.  It takes maybe 5 minutes to scan the 1.7 TB of files there to determine it doesn't have to back anything up if tht is the case.  This machine acts as my file and music server (running squeezebox server for my squeezeboxes), so it's already up anyway.

By default, Rsync will not delete files in the backup that have been deleted from the source.  So there are no worries about obliterating your backup because files disappeared from the source.  Of couse you can override this with a command line option :-).

This is way better than my previous method of backing up everything to DVDs.  Even with automation in the form of a Perl script, it was painful.
 

My motto is "it's not backed up unless you have at least 3 copys in 3 different places."

I have 4 copys of my music:

1. PC

2. MP3 player

3. USB stick

4. and just incase of a burglary or house fire I also have a copy hidden on the PC at work (just don't tell my boss).

I heard a story about a guy who had 2 hard drives setup in RAID 0 (striped array).  He used to do a backup once a week. At the end of the first week he would backup one of the drives then wait untill the end of the second week to back up the other drive.

Quote:

Originally Posted by steve1979 

I heard a story about a guy who had 2 hard drives setup in RAID 0 (striped array).  He used to do a backup once a week. At the end of the first week he would backup one of the drives then wait untill the end of the second week to back up the other drive.

I'm reasonably sure it's not possible to back up only one drive of a single logical volume containing multiple drives.  I don't mean just that it wouldn't work, I mean it's can't be done.  But I do recall the dark ages of RAID 0 being all the rage.

Quote:

Originally Posted by zoso947 

I'm reasonably sure it's not possible to back up only one drive of a single logical volume containing multiple drives.  I don't mean just that it wouldn't work, I mean it's can't be done.  But I do recall the dark ages of RAID 0 being all the rage.

Yes, it was a story that I read on another forum.  It's probably made up but it did make me laugh when I read it though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by steve1979 

Yes, it was a story that I read on another forum.  It's probably made up but it did make me laugh when I read it though.

We'll call that an example of someone using terms they didn't understand, perhaps? Can't say too much as I'm sure I've been guilty of the same on more than one occasion.

Then... It's not as bad as you sometimes see on TV where they really should know better.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DougofTheAbaci 

 

 

We'll call that an example of someone using terms they didn't understand, perhaps? Can't say too much as I'm sure I've been guilty of the same on more than one occasion.

 

Then... It's not as bad as you sometimes see on TV where they really should know better.

Some of the comments on that youtube video are brilliant

Heheh yeah... There's pretty much NOTHING about what she said that makes any sense. It's like they took a bunch of words, threw them together, and figured no one would notice.

On a more topic-related note, I'm still piecing together how I'm going to do the whole ZFS thing and you know what I've realized? No matter what I do it's going to be expensive. Awesome.

About every two weeks I backup the MY DOCUMENTS folder which includes music, photos...etc. to an external hard drive that is up and running 24/7. Then every 6 to 8 weeks that is backed up to a second external drive that in stored in a fire resistant strong box. I'll backup more frequently if I've taken a lot on photos or ripped a lot of music. I use the microsoft utility SyncToy.