Backing up in this current world of 1TB+...

[Mini-Me]

Howdy.

Being an informal member of the TB(Terra-byte) club, I am just wondering how I should go about putting some kind of backup process in place.

The problem is, I have such a huge amount of data, normal backup processes are inefficent, so I am wondering what other members here who also have 1TB or more in their machines do, as far as backups are concerned.

First, a little more info:

The box is primarily a DivX player at heart(not used for anything other then audio/video playback), running XP Pro with SP2 as the OS. The box uses a graphics card with a TV-out port, so I can plug the video into my TV.

On the hard-drive front, there are 4 IDE 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda's in the box: 1x 400GB, 2x 250GB and 1x 320GB, making a grand total storage capacity of 1.22TB.

Now, every DivX file or other media, is backed up to DVD first, then transferred to the mediaplayer box via the network.

XP's own disk-manager reports that all the drives are healthy.

Is there anything else I can put in place, to safe-guard the video files, in case one of the HDD's dies in some fashion?

I'm not expecting this to happen, as I have not had a single Seagate die on me yet, which is a testiment to their quality, however, that comment not withstanding, all hard-drives can and do fail at some point, so I can't assume that just because they are Seagate, they will never die!!!
:D

As I mentioned, having such a huge amount of storage makes any backup method difficult, so I am just curious if there is any point at all to backing up in more then to DVD-R, as I currently do?

My theroy is that, if a drive dies, I can buy another one, and restore all the video files from the DVD-R archive copies.

While this is true, CD-R/DVD-R's also degrade in time, so I kinda get the feeling that i'm snookered!
:p

Anyone got any opinions?

[Sylvander]

I've never done 1 below, but I'd guess you could...
1. Use a USB2 or Firewire external enclosure that holds multiple HDD's.

I do...
2. Keep all your data files off C: [the boot partition].

3. SYNCHRONISE [your data files for] each internal partition to their designated external partition.
I use the FREE version of "SyncBack".
The 1st synchronisation takes a long time because ALL files must be copied from the SOURCE to the DESTINATION.
But after that's done, further synchronisations take very little time because only the CHANGES to the files need to be copied over [from SOURCE to DESTINATION, or even back from destination to source (unusual = if source files have been deleted in error)].
So if you add a single [huge] file, only that file needs to copied, which probably won't take too long.
Quite often when I synchronise, SOURCE = DESTINATION, so it only takes a few minutes, there are no changes to be made, nothing to be copied.

4. The good thing about synchronisation:
The files almost always ONLY MOVE FORWARD.
So they are always the latest copies, and there are 2 copies of each.
The destination copies can be zipped individually or collectively [as a whole] if you choose [to occupy minimum space].

[Paul Komski]

It's a pity that your four main storage drives are not more matched for size because with that amount of data I would strongly suggest some sort of RAID - probably RAID 5 - as a way of dealing with the danger of just one disk failing. If you, for example, had four 250s in a RAID 5 you would have 750 of usable space (which you could partition in whatever way took your fancy) and 250 of reundancy - but if any one drive failed you could replace it and rebuild the whole array. If two or more drives "failed" simultaneously (eg lightning strike or theft) then all data would be lost - so keeping stuff on removeable media or at a distant location is always wise if it is valuable data.

If down time would be important then always having a comlete mirror (RAID 1 or RAID 10) has its virtues but added redunancy and expense of course.

You could also consider backing up to a file server of some kind - an old box networked but with a nice big RAID array on a PCI card for example. Then use any one of a number of backup programs to automate/semi-automate backing-up to the networked box. Performance for simply backing-up wouldn't usually be critical and with the right card you could simply span all drives in it into one big volume if that was desired.

Very many ways "to skin cats". Imaging has its value for "going back to a point in time" and is particularly good at making compressed archives of system partitions. For raw data other methods are likely to be more appropriate.

PS - With the falling prices of storage, tape backup is really taking a back seat nowadays, though it is an option but it is unbelievably slow in comparison to just about any other method.

[rond36]

My backup solution is very expensive not only in $$$$, but in disk space too.

(10) hard drives with 2.168TB total drive space with 1.084TB usable

For general mass storage I use (2) 500GB Western Digital drives in a RAID-1 array from the Intel ICH7R RAID controller. Some of the space on this volume is used for images of my OS partitions.

For my OS and programs partitions I use (4) 146GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 (15,000 RPM) SAS hard drives and (4) 146GB Western Digital Raptor hard drives in RAID 0+1 from the Adaptec 4800SAS 64bit 133MHz PCI-X serial attached SCSI RAID card. On this volume I also have all of my game CD images for my CD-ROM emulator.

So that the Raptors don't slow the Cheetahs down I can pull one of the Raptors out of its hot-swap bay and break the mirror and my RAID controller will auto fall back and run the Cheetahs in RAID-0. This also prevents a virus infection of the mirror drives because they are off line most of the time.