backups for a 2T hard drive

[Paul]

Never thought I'd ever ask, but what do people use for backing up large
drives, like the 1 or 2 terabyte drives or larger? Hope not a
"cloud/mainframe".

Just installed a 2T onto the router for media (music) & will be doing
a project to rip my CDs to the drive for access via DLNA. I'll be
starting with the CDs that were xferred from vinyl records & will be
listening mostly from the network capable AVR I got earlier this year.

If I know myself abit, the project will take "forever"; but still the
thought of backups will also take forever.

Tape drives still a good option, if found?

Backing up to another 2TB disk is your best option. Tape, not so much.

Paul

 

[anotherpaul]

Never thought I'd ever ask, but what do people use for backing up large
drives, like the 1 or 2 terabyte drives or larger? Hope not a
"cloud/mainframe".

Just installed a 2T onto the router for media (music) & will be doing
a project to rip my CDs to the drive for access via DLNA. I'll be
starting with the CDs that were xferred from vinyl records & will be
listening mostly from the network capable AVR I got earlier this year.

If I know myself abit, the project will take "forever"; but still the
thought of backups will also take forever.

Tape drives still a good option, if found?

 

[Nobody > (Revisited)]

Backing up to another 2TB disk is your best option. Tape, not so much.

Paul

I'll "back that up" as well...

Tape's not a viable option for most users. It's still viable for some
"big iron" IT situations, but even those folks have moved to multiple
media-storage formats.

I know, I've played with too many tape-based backup systems over the
years both for myself and others.

The biggest issue has always been speed, and hardware/media cost going
up hard behind that.

On second thought, put "support death" on tape drives as the biggest. It
doesn't matter how good the "stuff" is, if you can't find software
and/or hardware to retrieve those backups 5-10 years later, the whole
thing was a waste.

At least for now (even considering the price-gouging done on hard-drives
over the Thailand flooding) using hard-drives to backup hard-drives is
probably the best answer.



--
"Shit this is it, all the pieces do fit.
We're like that crazy old man jumping
out of the alleyway with a baseball bat,
saying, "Remember me motherfucker?"
Jim “Dandy” Mangrum

 

[anotherpaul]

I'll "back that up" as well...

Tape's not a viable option for most users. It's still viable for some
"big iron" IT situations, but even those folks have moved to multiple
media-storage formats.

I know, I've played with too many tape-based backup systems over the
years both for myself and others.

The biggest issue has always been speed, and hardware/media cost going
up hard behind that.

On second thought, put "support death" on tape drives as the biggest. It
doesn't matter how good the "stuff" is, if you can't find software
and/or hardware to retrieve those backups 5-10 years later, the whole
thing was a waste.

At least for now (even considering the price-gouging done on hard-drives
over the Thailand flooding) using hard-drives to backup hard-drives is
probably the best answer.

Thanks for the info everyone. Will get another hard drive for backup
when I get enough converted; prices will probably drop more then.

 

[Michael Black]

Never thought I'd ever ask, but what do people use for backing up large
drives, like the 1 or 2 terabyte drives or larger? Hope not a
"cloud/mainframe".

Just installed a 2T onto the router for media (music) & will be doing
a project to rip my CDs to the drive for access via DLNA. I'll be
starting with the CDs that were xferred from vinyl records & will be
listening mostly from the network capable AVR I got earlier this year.

Your backups are the CDs themselves. You don't get to rip them and then
sell off the CDs. Yes, all that work has to be redone, but that's what
CDs are for in the age of MP3s.

Get another drive, and use it to mirror the current one.

See how much space you actually fill, and what is absolutely important.
I'm still barely using the 160gig I got in 2005. Most of the space I've
used up is just partitions for new releases of Linux, which could be
deleted if I had the need for the space. I decided that drive was so big
that I wouldn't partition it from the start, I'd just carve out partitions
as I needed them. So when I got a camera, I allocated a partition for
that. When I started turning my CDs into MP3s, I allocated a partition
for that. By keeping reasonable size partitions, it makes it easier to
backup the Important Stuff. So as I scan manuals for things I've bought
(or downloaded the manuals), I keep them in a special partition, and the
idea was to back up that with a CD or more likely at this point a DVD.
But as large as the files seemed, it really amounts to too little to waste
a blank DVD on, so I bought some USB flash drives. Treat them mostly as
"write only", every so often save the newer additions to the flash drive.
It should be reasonable backup, and since i"m not constantly deleting,
I'll not end up writing to a particular spot too many times. I have one
partition for what might be considered particularly important personal
things, like passwords, and that gets another flash drive. If I actually
went through the photos I took and took out the junk, I'd probably start
saving the good ones to a usb flash drive. The point is that in keeping
photos separate from MP3s and separate from manuals and separate from text
I download, it makes each a manageable partition, and thus it can be
mostly mirrored to usb flash drives (or blank DVDs). If I had massively
large paritions of all kinds of things, it would be harder to do this. If
I had lots of video files, it would also be more difficult, due to the
size of the files.

One thing worth remembering is that some of the nagging if a drive goes
bad isn't so much that things are lost, but that you can't remember what
might be important. Keeping track makes sense.


Michael

 

[Flasherly]

Never thought I'd ever ask, but what do people use for backing up large
drives, like the 1 or 2 terabyte drives or larger? Hope not a
"cloud/mainframe".

Just installed a 2T onto the router for media (music) & will be doing
a project to rip my CDs to the drive for access via DLNA. I'll be
starting with the CDs that were xferred from vinyl records & will be
listening mostly from the network capable AVR I got earlier this year.

If I know myself abit, the project will take "forever"; but still the
thought of backups will also take forever.

Took me a couple years just to re-transfer vinyl, I'd put on tape, to
encode on CDs and eventually to DVDs. Of course once digital and past
"real time", it's a lot easier "gear it up" for the jobs, favoring
transfer equip as needed to make aspects for jobs easier. Past hard
partitions as the sizes become increasingly unimaginable, also, every
little trick helps. . . I like this one, a real sweet hum-dinger.

http://www.disktrix.com/downloads/UltimateDefrag3UserGuide.pdf

When reading up on soundboard advancements, they're really aren't any
comparatively to when I bought a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. Chip-wise,
soundwise and OpAmpwise, the advancements are relatively sparse
between then and now. Still, I got a Asus Xonar recently with a
lightfeed fibre (TOSLINK) cord for, luckily, an EQ I didn't consider
for laser feeds when purchased, but which handles DAC><DAC. Clear(er)
and clean(er @DAC stages) and hardly nothing for the ASUS, compared to
what the analog-pathed Turtle Beach cost (which I used to transfer the
tapes).

 

[Peter]

Never thought I'd ever ask, but what do people use for backing up large
drives, like the 1 or 2 terabyte drives or larger? Hope not a
"cloud/mainframe".

Just installed a 2T onto the router for media (music) & will be doing
a project to rip my CDs to the drive for access via DLNA. I'll be
starting with the CDs that were xferred from vinyl records & will be
listening mostly from the network capable AVR I got earlier this year.

If I know myself abit, the project will take "forever"; but still the
thought of backups will also take forever.

Tape drives still a good option, if found?

So you're just backing up CDs? In what format. Not in their original WAV
format hopefully. You could save a lot of space using a format that
allows for compression, which would then allow for a lot less time and
space for backing up. You could probably fit 10,000 40 minute CDs on 1TB
in a decent mp3 format, for instance.

 

[hp]

snip

Thanks for the info everyone. Will get another hard drive for backup
when I get enough converted; prices will probably drop more then.

This Idea might be worth exploring specially if your hardware is fairly
recent.

I am using the ANTEC hotswap slot in my PC case.
that allows the usage of a SATA harddrive as tho it were a plugin drive,
AND by using the slot all my file transfers go as fast as doing things
between 2 internal drives. And when all done, Just unplug it and put it
away until the next time.

A short link to a product listing, many places sell this, even some
office supplies places have them in their tech isles

http://www.langtoninfo.com/showitem.aspx?isbn=0999992696738

 

[Charlie Hoffpauir]

This Idea might be worth exploring specially if your hardware is fairly
recent.

I am using the ANTEC hotswap slot in my PC case.
that allows the usage of a SATA harddrive as tho it were a plugin drive,
AND by using the slot all my file transfers go as fast as doing things
between 2 internal drives. And when all done, Just unplug it and put it
away until the next time.

A short link to a product listing, many places sell this, even some
office supplies places have them in their tech isles

http://www.langtoninfo.com/showitem.aspx?isbn=0999992696738

The Antex Hotswap slot is the way I went, too. I strongly recommend
it. And if your computer seems to have a difficult time recognizing
the newly plugged in drive, try a copy of "Hotswap". It's available in
32 and 64 bit versions, and seems to work with just about everything.
I've used it on my Win 7 Pro 64 bit, my old Vista and my older XP
computers. It's downloadable, and I think it was free.... or at least
very cheap.

 

[Nobody > (Revisited)]

This Idea might be worth exploring specially if your hardware is fairly
recent.

I am using the ANTEC hotswap slot in my PC case.
that allows the usage of a SATA harddrive as tho it were a plugin drive,
AND by using the slot all my file transfers go as fast as doing things
between 2 internal drives. And when all done, Just unplug it and put it
away until the next time.

A short link to a product listing, many places sell this, even some
office supplies places have them in their tech isles

http://www.langtoninfo.com/showitem.aspx?isbn=0999992696738

Good recommendation, I have and use the same.
I was going to plug it , but you beat me to it...

Just for clarification, it's the Antec "EasySATA"
http://store.antec.com/Product/accessories-other/easy-sata/0-761345-30750-5.aspx
( http://snipurl.com/antrc-easysata )

(the "antrec" works, I fat-fingered it that way...)

It's also "hot-swap" capable, but that depends on both BIOS settings and
the SATA controller port you plug it into. Typically, you have to have
the SATA port it's on configured as AHCI and not as IDE or "Legacy".

But...

I wish I could remember the add-in SATA card that did this, but I did
have one that did do "hotswap" in IDE mode.

There are a few mobos and add-in SATA cards that won't do hotswap in AHCI.



--
"Shit this is it, all the pieces do fit.
We're like that crazy old man jumping
out of the alleyway with a baseball bat,
saying, "Remember me motherfucker?"
Jim “Dandy” Mangrum

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Tape's not a viable option for most users. It's still viable for some
"big iron" IT situations, but even those folks have moved to multiple
media-storage formats.

The last time I looked at the numbers you needed a hell of a lot of
data to make tape economically viable compared to simply extra disks.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Never thought I'd ever ask, but what do people use for backing up large
drives, like the 1 or 2 terabyte drives or larger? Hope not a
"cloud/mainframe".

Just installed a 2T onto the router for media (music) & will be doing
a project to rip my CDs to the drive for access via DLNA. I'll be
starting with the CDs that were xferred from vinyl records & will be
listening mostly from the network capable AVR I got earlier this year.

If I know myself abit, the project will take "forever"; but still the
thought of backups will also take forever.

Tape drives still a good option, if found?

Just get another 2tb disk to copy to!

 

[anotherpaul]

Just get another 2tb disk to copy to!

Will do so when the time comes. The idea of a hot swap sata drive
is intriguing but my connection speed will still be limited to the 2T
being connected to the ROUTER via its usb 2.0 port. The harddrive
behaves like a media server on lan; no need to have a computer for
read access; not quite a nas drive but still a network storage device.
The router, Netgear wndr3700v1, has a built-in dlna server.

The 2T external harddrive has a usb 3.0 usb port; also saw usb 3.0
pcie cards on Fry's website. So when the time comes, I'll be getting
a usb 3.0 pcie adaptor & a 2T harddrive as the most resonable
solution.

Have started to convert the converted CDs to FLAC & found that some
CDs need to be tossed as unreadable (was getting cheap stuff at the
computer shows back in 1999); think part of the problem was I didn't
know what the "OPC" process meant at that time.

The tedius part, so far, is entering album & track info for the id
tags as only an occassional cd had info in the freecddb. Should be
easier when doing "real" CDs.

 

[GMAN]

Will do so when the time comes. The idea of a hot swap sata drive
is intriguing but my connection speed will still be limited to the 2T
being connected to the ROUTER via its usb 2.0 port. The harddrive
behaves like a media server on lan; no need to have a computer for
read access; not quite a nas drive but still a network storage device.
The router, Netgear wndr3700v1, has a built-in dlna server.

The 2T external harddrive has a usb 3.0 usb port; also saw usb 3.0
pcie cards on Fry's website. So when the time comes, I'll be getting
a usb 3.0 pcie adaptor & a 2T harddrive as the most resonable
solution.

Have started to convert the converted CDs to FLAC & found that some
CDs need to be tossed as unreadable (was getting cheap stuff at the
computer shows back in 1999); think part of the problem was I didn't
know what the "OPC" process meant at that time.

The tedius part, so far, is entering album & track info for the id
tags as only an occassional cd had info in the freecddb. Should be
easier when doing "real" CDs.

For ripping, give this software a try

AUDIGRABBER

http://www.audiograbber.org/