I'll post this here for public consumption.
Online backups. Without disrespect to Miles, your data lives in someone elses house, they take forever to upload because your download speed is usually very good and your upload speed sucks a fat one, and you may discover that your ISP has a Gig/mo limit that you didn't know about and they decide to impose on you. Okay you didn't notice it watching HULU or porn or whatever, but uploading 50~100Gb over a 15/1.5mb pipe might draw their attention. Additionally whomever you're backing up with will charge you $$$ every month to do it. So, if you have ample bandwidth without a Gb/mo limit, are fine paying another $/mo bill, don't mind someone else having access to your data, and have sufficiently intelligent software capable of handling full and incremental backups, do Online Backups. If your house burns down, your last backup will be retrievable - providing you're not still uploading it. He's not wrong, it's not an awful solution. But I've never found it usable.
<a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136228">Little WD external laptop drives</a>: Without disrespect to Jason, they're small and cheap but are only good from the last time your drunk dumb ass happened to remember to plug it in and back it up which is always way too long ago. Also, at the time you really need your backup, everything WILL fuck up. This little WD drive pictured there? Yeah suddenly on game day that little bugger's not going to recognize for whatever reason. Or come down with a ticking noise. Or you'll lose it. Or drop it. Or realize you lent it to someone. Or whatever. If you're broke or just a cheap ass, go get one of these, plug it into the back of your desktop, forget it exists, and schedule windows backup utility (or whatever) to do a dump to it. It's not pretty, but it
might be better than nothing. But only barely.
Frankly, I'm with langston on this one. Get a small RAID appliance. It's a little more expensive to setup on the outset but in a month you won't remember spending the money - we're not talking about a truckload of money. Get one of <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817332018&cm_re=drive_enclosure_sata_raid_1-_-17-332-018-_-Product">THESE</a>, put it into a RAID 1 and either work exclusively from this drive, or follow the above technique of plugging it into the back of your computer and scheduling a backup to dump to it. It's a RAID 1 meaning that even if the RAID fucks up, you can still read the data on the disk. And for the record, RAID doesn't fuck up very often, esp not under the load you're going to put it under. In the 10ish years I've been doing this, I've seen RAID arrays have critical failures maybe 4 times, and these are big gnarly high performance jobbers under a lot of load. RAID failure probably won't be your problem. If you have a lot of data, get one of <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817332017&cm_re=drive_enclosure_sata_raid_1-_-17-332-017-_-Product">THESE</a> or one of their ilk, and just work off it all the time. Either direction you won't regret and have been (at least for me) a durn sight better than either online backups or little portable hdds.
Personally, I use a <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822240010&cm_re=drobo-_-22-240-010-_-Product">DROBO</a> to manage my home media library which is running at around 3Tb+ movies and 200Gb+ of music. I operate directly from the array. Professionally one of my many responsibilities is to manage our growing 60Tb storage environment at work. I don't know if this lends credibility to my position here or not, but I walk the talk in this arena. Everywhere else, I lie like the Grinch at Xmas.
Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2009 10:25 am