PC Data / Storage Question
 

Fo da experts here - I need to back-up/save my personal and business files from my laptop. I want something secure and easy to access. Possibly multiple options for fail safe insurance plan "A" then "B"

I'v been told online service like (Carbonite) that automatically back up every day for @$20/yr for access from any IE connection - or a flash/thumb drive..........or both. I do not want to create a recovery disc for the machine. I want something mo betterer

Carbonite is OK as long as you don't have a lot of huge files. We use Norton 360 as an anti-virus and one of the many things it does is a backup. It has an option for on-line backup or across your network. To backup a few data files is is pretty handy. Select the few files you want to backup and forget it.

Constant backup on-line or at least off site is important if your business or home catches fire or has some other natural disaster. Security than is a mater of trusting that off site facility to remain up and secure.

....

Twenty years ago I proposed an online backup service...

My tech friends all laughed at me "no one would trust their data online".

I have an external USB drive (1TB $99) you could buy two and keep one offsite.

I bought a 1 TB back-up (USB) for $75. That's pretty cheap. And fast compared to interwebbing your data.

I've thought about a detachable SATA drive that I could put in a fire safe every night. Just never did it.

My backup routine is as follows.
1. Entire system is backed up weekly on a 2nd internal hard drive. (If I had a laptop I would use an external SATA drive).
2. Critical files (Quicken files, Outlook files, and work files) are backed up online with Norton 360 every night. This is about 200 Meg worth.
3. Once a year I burn the entire system backup onto Blu-Ray disks and put them in the storage unit.

In a worst case scenario (fire), I only lose 12 months worth of pictures/music and then I can get the latest critical files from Norton online.

I would consider a complete online backup if I didn't have 500 Gigs of pictures/music. This is way too much to send over the internet and not cost effective either. Plus, I get 4Gb of free Norton online storage for free when I bought the product.

The compared cost of online is buying the second hard drive to protect against hard drive crashes and the blu-ray drive + media for fire protection.

Fry's electronics just had a USB external drive on sale last weekend. 2TB for $69 bux.

You could back up the entire computer on the puppy. Buy two and use one every other week, storing the drives in off site locations.

thanx all - great suggestions........all info pretty much what I had in mind

Regarding the external hard drives & USB connected TB drives: they eventually do go bad. Build into your backup methodology a hardware refresh at least once every 2 years.

if you are serious about your data, you may want to consider a raid solution on your active/live data: this uses more disks, but if one of the drive drives fail, the system can automatically rebuild the data based on parity logic. The rebuild time is relatively short - minutes vs. the days it may take to recover from a complete single hardrive failure.

Disaster Recovery is a huge and growing business. But with new technologies, the old Tape and truck backup method (equivalent to Blue-Ray and offsite storage) method is often too slow.

I am not a big fan of online backup services. Once your data hits the cloud, it can be open to more vulnerabilities. Yeah, the cloud has been deemed "safe" but it is a public cloud. Private clouds help make things more secure, but now you need to maintain the cloud, and that can get costly.

My suggestion for you would be to create a small "active/active" or "active/passive" environment. Designate two sites in your infrastructure - maybe your home and your office. The establish a "VPN" network (Virtual Private Network) between the two sites. Many companies have software that can do this. Once you have a VPN connection, you can safely suffle data back and forth between the two sites.

Next, you can get software to manage the dataflow -- either daily 'pushes' of data from one site to the other: full backups or incremental backups - at least nightly - done during off-hours to minimize disruption. (I would suggest a weekly full system backup with daily incrementals) Or another option is realtime online syncing of data. The cost factor is mainly in the 'pipe' ie: what type of bandwidth you have between the two sites.

All this hardware, software, and bandwidth sound expensive, but it is not that bad -- consider these factors:
1. If you loose everything, how much will that cost you?
2. If you only have backups to a hard drive or DVD's, can you afford the downtime while you recover everything? Your time to recover includes purchasing new hardware (new PC/laptop), configuring that hardware, transferring the data, and bringing the systems back up.

Treat Disaster Recovery as an insurance policy: you gotta spend $$ on it, but you hope never to have to use it! But if you do have to use it, you get what you pay for!

-Z-man.

We run our business with our data on a RAID network appliance. This appliance also has a USB connected drive for a weeks worth of daily backups. There is also a large compact flas drive on the front which is a single nightly backup. This is the "grab and go" device.

My plan is to purchase a fireproof (2hr rating) and to store these units in the firesafe. I also need to have some of the most critical data on our network stored offsite.

As far as PCs are concerned, I've been moving all of our units to small SSD drives for fast startup and the old large disk drives are becoming storage/backup drives. The PCs can still boot off the old disk, if the SSD dies.

I was doing backup onto the network drives, but it seemed to take too long.

Similar to R-B post above, I use (2) Synology nas boxes, one local and another off-site, both raid. They back up(sync) automatically.