PC backup

[lovingboth]

I thought I'd sorted the best way to backup a home PC: a USB2-EIDE dongle connected to a spare hard drive.

Fast, at least as reliable as the PC's drives, high capacity, portable, easily upgradable, much less hassle than swapping a hundred or so CD-Rs about with my previous favourite method (Ghost / DriveImage saving whole drives to a CD writer), easily checkable (not much is worse than finding your backup won't restore) and much cheaper than other good methods.

Unfortunately, guess what was the one bit of PC kit to go?

So, buy another one or something else?

I'm tempted by a DVD writer, but that means dealing with 20s of DVD+-R[W] discs.

And while I remember - anyone got a QIC-120 tape drive, the sort that fits to the floppy drive controller? Ancient kit, but these used to be much better than swapping a hundred floppy disks around... until the PC with the drive got nicked from someone else's flat leaving me with some tape cartridges I'd like to access at some point.

Comments

[conflux.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear about the break in.

Did that tape drive I gave you work in the end? Personally I'm going for the mirrored hard drive option but that doesn't help if you have the computer stolen.

[lovingboth]

No, the software I need to use - Central Point Backup - won't talk to it for a start :(

Quite. Or if it suffers a number of other deaths. Including, depending on how it's set up, one of the disks dying! I've heard too many stories of people trying to find disks that are no longer manufactured so they'll fit into some mirroring or striping scheme to risk it.

I'm not quite good enough to have the backup offsite (although there are some CDs of the main documents offsite) but I do think it needs to be in another room at least...

[elves-uk.livejournal.com]

I back up with a number of methods, Zip drive, cd's. jazz drive, DVD and now have a redundant tape drive to play with. Although I still think the usb drive thing is still by far the most straightforward solution.

IMHO

[kingginger.livejournal.com]

Go with the mirrored Hard drive on USB2... Or firewire...

I use both options...

I have a USB2 / Firewire external hard drive,

Then the firewire daisy chains to a caddy that can mount anything (CD / HD etc etc anything I like).

I also have a USB2 HD hook up device - but its "raw" (i.e. it has no casing for the hard drive to be mounted in).

But definatly hard drives I think are infinitely faster and more accessible than any tape these days.

But then thats why we have started using the Lacie Big Discs at work (and I gather Maxtor now make one aswell!).