BackUp solution

[jonnybefree]

Just wondering what hardware you guys are using for backup.
I mean, you're burning dvd's? using external harddiscs?
we used to to burn it all on dvd's, but after a few 100's gigabite projects we decided to using hard discs.
now we have 2 boards of hard discs here.. and its growing....
i mean we're a small company, and not too much space for it...
best regards

Jonas

[Syclone1]

Im currently using 3 Drobo's (www.drobo.com) and I love them. They are rock solid and the service from Drobo them selves is top notch, I use 2 on site and one off site for a backup.

[dlparisi]

2nd for Drobo. I've got 3 1tb drives in mine which gives me a total of 1.8 tb of protected data storage. If I start running out of room I can add another 1 tb drive to bring me to 2.7 TB or start replace the drives with 2tb drivesto bring me to a current maximum of 5.5 TB. I think as they come out with larger hard drives the capacity can increase as well (i.e., with 3tb and up drives) but I've never really checked into it. It's connected over USB2.0 so it's not the fastest thing in the world but is just fine for unattended backups (they also make a eSATA version as well though). If you need more storage they have 8 bay versions instead of the 4 bays.

You didn't ask but for software I'm running Retrospect Express which I really like as it doesn't need to create full backups in order to restore the entire drive if necessary. I forget exactly how it works but it basically makes sure it has 'x' number of copies of a file on the hard drive and as long as that file does not get change it will not back it up again, ever. Yet it still maintains the complete file structure of the drive at the time of the backup so you can restore the drive to any point in time. This saves a huge amount of space on the backup drives so I don't run out of space on the 1.8tb available. It may not be as bullet proof as a tape backup with full copies but it works for me.

[zoranm]

Jonas,
I'm currently in the same boat and deciding what backup to use instead of good old DVDs. Has anyone got any experience with blu-ray? How vulnerable are they? Reading some posts on the internet it's quite easy to demage them and they are not cheap either.
On the other hand you can store 100Gb on 4 BlueRays or 2 doublelayered ones.
regards

Zoran

[simmsimaging]

I also use drobos and have been very happy with them. I have two: one is for day-to-day working files (I use it for the stability and safety, but it is slow) and one is for short-term backup (backup of each day's work, and maintain 2-3 months backlog of work there). All completed jobs go for long term backup on hard drives that I use with desktop hard drive toaster docks. For those I back things up to a synchronized pair of hard drives (usually two 500GB drives) one of which goes offsite. For backup software - for job files and synchronizing my long term backups I use Windows SyncToy, and for the OS/full machines I use a mix of Windows Backup and Acronis True Image (I have an older license of that, still a great program).

Drobo's are great, but I would go through too many of them if I backed up *all* work to those

b

[jonnybefree]

Drobos looking great indeed. and not too expensive either.
But neverless you have to keep the harddrives.
there i come to another question, do you keep the BU forever?
i thought maybe when a rack with 5 drives is full, wich needs enough time for 5 tb, you start to highly compress the first ones and burn it down to bluerays.

[arobbert]

I use an icy dock removable single drive housing (under $70 us). I run a mirror of my server there. Then I run daily incremental back ups to a local hard drive and keep those for a couple of months. Since the drives are hot swappable I can use the same enclosure for archiving. Hard drives are so cheap now less than $90 for a T byte and you can use NTFS compression to get more space out of that.

I see Icy Dock now makes multiple drive housings. Not as sweet as the Drobos but less than half the price. www.icydock.com

[beestee]

It's connected over USB2.0 so it's not the fastest thing in the world but is just fine for unattended backups (they also make a eSATA version as well though). If you need more storage they have 8 bay versions instead of the 4 bays.

I recently installed a generic ~$20 firewire card in my PC that is compatible with the 4-bay Drobo I have and it made a notable difference in speed.