![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lovingbothI 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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-13 08:58 am (UTC)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...