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Back up systems...
So my wifes HDD is puttering and wont boot up, none of the repair options including a repair right from a wind 7 64 install usb stick or cd seem to want to work... that said what do you guys use to back up stuff...dvd just don't cut it anymore as they are limited in size.
I am looking to be able to back up 2 or 3 pcs with a 1 TB capacity each so maybe something that can handle 4 TB or more. I have never much looked into this as previous I just used dvds and though that may still be viable option to back up say pictures and your calibre library it's just not good for any kind of video content anymore.
So advise me on what would be good to use that is reliable, has a large capacity doesn't have to be plugged in all the time and any other things I should be looking for in a back up medium that I may not know to ask or look for.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Comments
My personal backup plan is to have two 16 GB USB flash drives. I keep one connected to my desktop and the other not plugged into anything. I swap which one is connected to the computer periodically. That way, if something goes horribly awry and everything connected to the computer fries, I only lose maybe a week or so worth of data.
As for what I back up there, it's basically just the files that I care about. If I lose installed games and have to download them again, oh well. Same with reinstalling Windows 7. But my spreadsheets, documents, and source code don't exist anywhere but on my computer, so they're irreplaceable. Those also don't take much space, so they readily fit on a USB flash drive. I use the Windows 7 backup utility for daily incremental backups.
I also have an external USB hard drive to back up my entire SSD. That gets used once every several months, with the idea being that if my SSD fries, I might not lose all of my data. Most of the time, it's sitting on a shelf, so again, not plugged anything and can't be fried by the computer doing something weird.
But what's better than having good backup is not needing it. Naturally, you can't guarantee this, but you can take steps to make it more or less likely that your main system will fail. Replace any drives with data that you care about at least every five years, and possibly every three. Get a high quality power supply for your computer. I also put my computer behind a high quality UPS, so most power weirdness will never even reach my power supply. You have to make it so that everything that plugs into the computer goes through the UPS for this to work--and this includes the ethernet cable, not just power cords.
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If you have several computers on a single network to back up, you might want to look into a NAS to back them all up, and having two hard drives in RAID 1 in it. RAID 1 means that if one drive fails, you don't lose data because the other drive still has everything.
Yeah my wife seems to have a knack for killing her computers as I seem to have to rebuild/replace something every couple years lol...
Her pc isn't that old compared to mine, you can see my pc specs in my siggy. She has a
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i5-3570k with a 212 evo cooler
msi z77a gd65
seasonic psu
CM Storm Enforcer case with an extra megaflow fan on the top.
Her seagate barracuda 750gb is not new, it was in her old work pc, but is newer than the HDD I have in mine. I kind of though mine would crap out before hers tbh.
She is going to get this samsung 840 evo and I will see if a reformat will get her buggy 750 seagate hdd working for storage but good chances I will just a nice cheap 1TB HDD from newegg.
I did look into a NAS but at a quick glance it seem overly expensive for something that looks to me like just a bunch of harddrives in a case.
What would be two good external hard drives that could back up like 3 TB each?
USB stick wont cut it they just are not big enough, just her video folder is like 300GB
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
I have a NAS. I started with a 1-bay just to see how well it works, then migrated to a 2-bay (to have a mirrored array). Now I have a 4-bay because I outgrew my 2-bay.
A basic NAS is essentially a USB or other external hard drive, except it connects over the network. The fancy ones are miniature servers and can run programs (media databases, mail servers, web servers, firewalls, antivirus, etc), and usually have a nifty web interface for managing them.
NASes can be pricey - my 4-bay with 4 HDDs cost as much as a moderate gaming rig. I back up 6 PCs to it, it all occurs over my LAN with automated backup software. I figure one NAS is about the same price as 6 separate USB drives or whatever of comparable size for each PC, and a heck of a lot easier to manage. It's very nice for my laptop that goes in and out of the house - it gets on my LAN, it backs itself up - no forgetting to plug something in.
A house fire or something would still wipe my data, since I don't have an off-site complete backup. I suppose I could do that with a separate set of hard drives if I were really worried about it.
Also, I will state, that I tend to replace my hard drives (both HDD and SDD) every 3-4 years, even if it's not showing signs of failure. At work I use the old drives that have no SMART errors for routine off-site backups. At home, they usually get recycled into older computers and donated.
I back up my most important files to my second HD, and periodically from there to USB stick.
Less important data I just dump occasionally to an external HD.
Since Quizzical started talking about UPS: I'd say an UPS is overkill for simple home computer, but if you can get a decent surge protector cheap somewhere it would be good insurance that power spikes won't break your computer and at much cheaper price than UPS.
I have used the same NAS for 4y now, it is awesome and allows for swapping of drives if they die. You can get enclosures and add w/e size and quality of drives you like as well.
On a small budget I picked up an Iomega Stormaster cloud edition 2TB for 250$ and its drives have lasted me 4y of heavy use (I mainly use it as a media center now but I did torrent directly onto it for a good 2y)
I actually use a UPS that Quizzical helped me pick a couple years ago. One thing that I like to achieve is a consistent power delivery as I have seen an inconsistent one cause weird things to happen. I think its more for computer safety than data safety like a good PSU.
One thing I found nice about my UPS is that it tells me if the circuit has too much going on by letting out a beep.
I think this greatly depends on where you live and how reliable your power is.
Surge protector pretty much just protects you from lighting strikes or other immediate high voltage events on the line. That's about it. In some areas of the world that is a big concern (Florida comes to mind).
Brown outs will kill a computer just as quick as a lightning strike, it just isn't a sexy to watch. A UPS (with voltage correction) will save you through a brown out. Brownouts don't just occur in California, they can happen anywhere if a substation gets stressed enough, or if a transformer has problems (squirrels, cars on power poles, etc). Plus a UPS gives you the added benefit of actually being able to keep playing (at least for a while) if the power does go out.
A basic UPS with voltage correction to protect against this, at least here in the States, is around $50-70 US. I've seen many, many computers where a UPS may have saved a $300+ repair bill. A common call I get: the lights flickered and then the power went out, and now the computer just won't turn back on. Turns out power supply fried, ate the RAM and motherboard, sometimes video card, sometimes the hard drive... it happens a lot, and practically every one of these systems I see is plugged into a surge protector of some sort.
Yes, a surge protector is around $5, and a UPS is easily 10x that cost. But I think a UPS is a good insurance policy, with a nice added benefit of being able to play with the lights out. When ever I build or buy a computer for someone, I always include a new dedicated UPS in the build.
If your just looking for something basic bare bones, why not something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153133 -- that's just an external plug & play "enclosure", it has USB 3 and eSATA, either one would be fairly speedy. You can get USB2 ones for a bit cheaper. The benefit here is you can use practically any SATA drive with it, once your done you just pull the drive out. I use one like this all the time at work for mirroring or recovering hard drives and it's convenient.
Pair that with take your pick of any 3TB drive -- Newegg has a Seagate, Toshiba, and WD Green all listed for $109 right now that would work well enough for occasional offline storage. You could even use a pair of them and RAID them, although you'd have to use Software raid and recovery from that can be hit or miss.
I use an old (ish) workstation running OmniOS. Filesystem is ZFS so you're guaranteed not to get data corruption while your data is being stored. Silent bitrot is a problem that virtually all other filesystems suffer from.
CIFS, iSCSI and NFS setup are a breeze via command line although one could run http://napp-it.org/index_en.html if they wanted a web GUI.
If you dive in a bit deeper it's easy to setup zones (containers) for Owncloud, torrents, usenet, dns server and so on.
Infortrend make NASses that run ZFS but I've no idea if they use a custom OS which would probably limit the capabilities compared to OmniOS on an old PC / Workstation or w/e.
Thanks for the replies all.
Ridelynn what is the NAS you are using if I may ask?
rpmcmurphy that sounds quite interesting.
Quite a bit of food for thought in these posts will have to decide how much I want to invest and what my needs are before I decide a route to go!
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Personally, I use both cloud servicing and a drobo. For the super critical little stuff (personal docs, little files, tax garbage, blah blah) that all goes into my OneDrive, and I work on those directly on the OneDrive. So if my house gets obliterated, I still retain those.
For my large scale backup (typically things that can be gotten again, but are humongous, like downloaded movies, mp3s collected over the years, save games, etc) that all goes to my Drobo. The Drobo is a NAS, but an interesting one. If your looking for backup systems, I do actually highly recommend the Drobo. It gives you redundancy (up to two disks, if you want) so you can lose two disks from the unit and retain all the data. But the better feature, is that it supports mismatched sizes, and you can expand your size by adding new drives (I started with terrabytes and 500 gigs in mine, then slowly replaced them with 2 tb drives, and I can replace them again with 4 tb's when I need more room).
I'd recommend a drobo just for pure ease of use, but they do tend to be pricey.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Whether you should get a UPS depends greatly on both how stable the power is where you live and also on how much you value reliability. I originally bought my UPS when I lived somewhere that we'd have maybe half a dozen power outages per year--some of which could last tens of minutes.
If a hard drive crash means some hours of reinstalling and patching Windows and redownloading software, you can live with that. If it means a multi-million dollar business goes out of business, rather more aggressive reliability and backup measures are called for.
Currently I have a Synology 4-bay Diskstation. I have also used a Qnap and WD My Cloud.
The Qnap and Synology are very similar in terms of features, although I've had fewer compatibility issues with the Synology (mostly OS X/AFS file sharing stuff). Drobo is also a similar setup, I considered one but haven't tried one out.
The differences between these units are usually in the details. The processor is a big difference, they range from cheap (low powered ARM CPU that works fine, but may slow down file transfers and the interface) to fast (usually Intel CPUs in the top-end units). Physical build also plays a bit of a role - the more expensive units usually have hot-swappable trays to allow you to rack in new HDDs very fast with no tools, the cheaper ones are a couple of sheetmetal screws in a cheap plastic case. The software is pretty similar across the units - it's almost always something Linux-based with a Web-GUI on top for management. Top-end units may also have dual-ethernet ports for failure roll-over.
The WD MyCloud NAS was... very consumer-oriented. It is probably the easiest to set up if your a novice. It was also very sluggish and not nearly as open or capable as the other setups. That being said, the warranty support for WD is phenomenal, it was just unfortunate that I had to mail this particular one back 3 times under warranty.
Personally, I invested into a 4 bay ReadyNAS NV+ (very old one) to store all my Data and Backups. It can hold up to 6 TB of data using Raid 5.
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I back up 2 PC's a Laptop and a MacBook to it using Acronis Backup. I do 1 full backup for every 5 differentials and i keep 2 full and the first install. They are all getting backed up at Sunday night to Monday around lunch time once a week.
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I restore the backups using a boot disc also part of the Acronis Software bundle. So far i had to restore a couple of times and it always went without a hitch.
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I had to replace 2 HDDs from the array and never lost a singe File on it in what is now 6 years and the NAS runs 24/7.
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Price for the Whole setup (when i bought it):
TOTAL: ~$1000
Cost per year (6 year in Service now): ~$160
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I know this is not for everyone but if you want a secure and safe storage with no hassle and a long lifespan i would suggest a NAS + Backup Program.