Back that ass up

[greatbear]

Tonight I got my mitts on a nice shiny new LaCie 500GB external drive to use on this workstation solely as a backup drive. Unlike the array on the server which is always online (and vulnerable in some ways) this will be used only for regular backups. I am guilty of not making hard backups of critical stuff like the music and digital photos onto DVD nearly as often as I should. Yeah, I am lazy and sometimes I forget or put it off. I've paid the price for that laziness a few times. Luckily I only lost a small amount of fairly recent stuff that still can be gotten off of the CF cards and thumb drives or re-ripped, the last backups were only a month or so behind.

I wish there was a simpler means of dealing with the miles and miles of files (pretty files) that exist over here and will only get worse. DVD backups are a pain, and wholesale backups are tough to do economically. It's cheaper to buy large hard drives, make backups to them and put them in a safe place. I should upgrade to dual layer DVD for the hard backups to make things a bit easier. I used to think my 8 gig Exabyte tape drive from way back was da shit. Now it's just shit.

I know a lot of people in similar situations as me. A ton of data, but no backups. A disaster waiting to happen.

Comments

[ex-bearbong816.livejournal.com]

Sweet.

NTFS?

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Yep. Not sure what it is formatted as right now, the thing is still in the box. The Maxtor drives I have on the server came out of the box as FAT32. I initially kept them as such to be able to use them on other, non-NT machines. I had data corruption on one, then decided to go with NTFS on all three drives, since most of the PCs here are NT/2K/XP boxes.

[ex-bearbong816.livejournal.com]

Good idea.

I have Maxtor Firewire Drives on both my Mac and my primary PC and I really think they are great drives. Funny thing is though, both drives sometimes lock up on me, and I have to unplug them, and turn them off for a bit. But they've been reliable 99% of the time, and never had a major crash. I've had the Mac firewire drive for 5 years.

The Maxtor for the PC also came pre-formatted in Fat32 and I didn't realize I had to reformat it in NTFS till I noticed I could only capture 4 gigs of video. But then it made a world of difference and a drive that's not certified for video works perfect with it. I have NO complaints.

Groovy Tek talk with you.

[meddler-inc.livejournal.com]

I know how it is: my 40 gig crashed a few months ago, leaving me movie/music-less for a few weeks. :(

[danlmarmot.livejournal.com]

So... where'd you get the fat-ass drive from?

I'm in the same boat as you, tons of porn files that need backing up... and the 'drive on the shelf' concept is very attractive now that FireWire is speedy.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

It's so easy to collect stuff over time and not think about backing up because drives are not nearly as crash-prone as they were just a few years ago. Problem is, they can still go, and take a lot more with them now than ever.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I walked into the local CompUSA (or as I call it, KompUSSR) prepared to buy a Seagate external 400GB drive, which was the same price as the LaCie originally but had 70 bux in rebates to knock it down to $330. I hate rebates. Seeing the LaCie came with Firewire 400 and 800 a well as USB2.0 (Maxtor only had FW400 and 2.0), the fact that the LaCie is actually made of two 250ig drives striped and has a higher throughput, I opted for the bigger drive. I have three of the Maxtor externals on the server and been happy with them (though one did crash a while back, changing from FAT32 to NTFS seems to be a lot more reliable).

The drive that died in this PC is also a Maxtor (250g), but I have a feeling all it needs is a reformat.