What is and would be the best way for backing up and archiving?

Mike Connor · 08 Jan 2011

BomberAF said:

Well it's not an office as such it's my bedroom, but I do take your point. Can you recomend one of the external HDD bays that you are talking about that you can just add drives too. You would also have to be around to be able to remove the HDD, and thats is why I do have online backups.

Like I said my data is very important too me.

Sorry, I don't recommend specific brands or things like that,as a matter of principle, and to be honest with you I don't even know what the site policy here is on such matters. I will have to ask.

There are plenty of reviews online of all sorts of things, you have to spend some time informing yourself.

I will recommend that you obtain separate portable external drives. Which system you choose is up to you, but I would use eSATA interfaces, with AHCI drivers,

Advanced Host Controller Interface - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

as these allow "hot-plugging" ( means you can simply and safely remove the drive cable or switch the unit off while the system is running without data loss or other problems ), and I would not bother with things like RAID arrays and such for small business use, they are far too chancy in my opionion. Not so much technically per se, but because people don't know how to use them properly, and they also tend to engender a false sense of security.

Regards....Mike Connor

ignatzatsonic · 09 Jan 2011

I think to an ordinary home user, the greatest threats are theft or disasters such as fire and flood that affect both originals and single backups at the primary location.

A burglar or common thief might well grab your computer or anything immediately connected to it, such as external drives.

He's much less likely to locate or have any interest in a thumb drive the size of your finger tucked away somewhere.

Having said that, if you don't have your backups in 2 distinct physical locations, you are certainly exposed to a theft, fire, or flood loss.

Another thing to ponder: having a good backup and then over-writing it with a bad original that you don't know is bad at the time. An original file may become corrupt or you may unknowingly make an unwanted change to it---and then back it up, thereby overwriting a good copy of the file. If this happens, you may never be aware of it until you need the backup--and then discover it isn't what you thought it would be.

DVDs are problematic for various reasons---cumbersome, shelf life, low capacity, readability, etc.

You can consider on line backups--that gives you another physical location, but many have aversions to online methods.

Images are dubious because imaging at the consumer level is far from foolproof. I do image my operating system partition---but I don't keep any personal data on that partition. If the image won't restore, I have to reinstall Windows--which I can live with.

I'd vote for folder by folder (non-imaging) periodic backup to multiple locations--such as rotating hard drives on site and off site. Flash drives are not as reliable or cost-effective but worthwhile to some extent simply because of their small size, ease of concealing, and relative high capacity.

How often depends on the rate of change of your data. If you add one new picture of grandma per week, maybe you don't change the backup very often.

For the record, I don't follow my own advice very well.