I back up to two separate hard drives. I figure they won't both fail at the same time.

32gb usb keys and 16gb SD cards cost nothing now, making the use of both dvd and external discs pointless (except for speed, in other words hd-porn). i have 4 similar usb keys using xcopy between them. sort of like extremely slow raid lol. and an extra sd card which always is plugged in for temporarly files leaving my OS almost clean of files. optical will die soon.

i always have a fear of flash memory being demagnetized


also think about this- im thinking of backing crucial data up for the 30-100 year period here, not the 3-5 year.


i feel the possibility of flash drives becoming corrupted or demagnetized greater

am i paranoid? are my opinions completely unfounded?



we can still read magetic tape if we need to-- obviously quality is higher now.. there will always be legacy equipment

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safest is tape. Most big studios still use it.

Second safest is hardrive with multiple redundancies. Multiple nested raid arrays in 2 different locations.

Blue Ray and DVD are not valid back up formats. DVD's are rated at about 2 years. The dye does is rather volatile. Blue ray , i don't know the specifics has rather poor results.

If you are serious about backing up, tape or hardrive, I would sat cloud is ok for projects as well as long as you keep a physical backup.

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old stuff from days gone by (2001-2004)
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quote:

Originally posted by Looney4Clooney safest is tape. Most big studios still use it. Second safest is hardrive with multiple redundancies. Multiple nested raid arrays in 2 different locations. Blue Ray and DVD are not valid back up formats. DVD's are rated at about 2 years. The dye does is rather volatile. Blue ray , i don't know the specifics has rather poor results. If you are serious about backing up, tape or hardrive, I would sat cloud is ok for projects as well as long as you keep a physical backup.

thanks man much appreciated... seemed like a decent low cost solution but looks like tape and HDs still win

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Fortuna Favet Fortibus.

Tape devices haven't really changed Iin 10 years. It is expensive, and time consuming. It is a full time job.

___________________
"This is why Superman works alone." GC
old stuff from days gone by (2001-2004)
Mad For Brad's gay little contest

i dont see the problem with say 4 external hds and xcopy or something once a week. run it as a scheduler. put one or two of the hds in a firesafe in your house and the other two at work or somewhere else safe.
you could backup lets say the two hds in your house odd number weeks and the other two hds at work even number weeks (assuming you bring them home every second week). i wouldnt trust cloud backup of any kind. thats just another move to control you by the government.

or get two NAS raid storages, one in your house, one in your basement/garage whatever, both in firesafes. completely available for hackers but who cares.

been thinking about this alot myself and i figured it was better to start deleting things, and release everything else. now i only need a couple of usb-pens.

Last edited by Zak McKracken on Jan-16-2013 at 23:07

raid 6 in 2 locations.

___________________
"This is why Superman works alone." GC
old stuff from days gone by (2001-2004)
Mad For Brad's gay little contest

I actually just started doing this. I backed up around 20+ or so sample CDs onto a 25GB blu-ray disc. Took about 12 minutes to burn. The 25GB discs are quite cheap, as I got a spindle of 15 for $15, but the 50GB discs are still kind of pricey. This is not my preferred method of backing up, more of something to try once and see how it goes. I prefer backing up to my network or cloud storage.

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I don;t really see the problem with USB drives.

The other week,I found and old 128mb (yes, 128mb, when that was the biggest you could get) from 10 years ago and all the music and data was perfectly intact. Was like finding a time capsule lol.

It had also been pretty badly abused (travelled the globe a few times kocking about in suitacases, going through airport xrays, shit spilt on it, stepped on) and all was fine.

Sure I wouldn't use it as my primary long term backup medium, but if you're really looking for a storage medium for 30-100 years, then even tape won't last that well unless you keep it in a shielded, controlled storage environment.

Tape is what we've always used at the studios and more often that not you have a dedicated and ancient computer with a SCSI interface for the tape backup. Takes hours though (I think ours is 32gb per hour and that was better than most).

Personally, I use multiple Hard Drives, USB keys and for the really vital stuff, I streamline it, copy it to a quality brand DVD (not DVD-RW!)and send it to my family home in the UK.

That means 3 backup mediums, and that's not including some dropbox and server space for certain things.

You can use upgrade drives as peridoic backups;basically, copy the most vital stuff (like the stuff I would cry over if lost) to a new drive when a new install is required and retire the old drive. Do this each time and after 10 years you'll have like 4 copies of it on old drives.

I think my most vital stuff is spread over IDE, SATA, SATAII and SATAIII by now.

I would assume flah drives are an awful choice for backup for many of the reasons ssd is not a good choice. Just a quick search tells me they are not a suitable backup.

___________________
"This is why Superman works alone." GC
old stuff from days gone by (2001-2004)
Mad For Brad's gay little contest