Question about backing up

[zeretul1]

I the days of 240+gb hard drives, how does one back up
there stored data. I myself have about 30gb of data that
I would prefer not to loss, so how would I back it up? My
data is kept on a secondary hard drive from the os and
program files, and I have about half of the secondary
drive filled up. I have only two ide ports on my
motherboard and already have 4 ide devices plugged in.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Much love!

 

[FireFox]

Well, there are numerous "tape" type of backup systems that would
support backups of these sizes (not sure about the cost or speed of them).
If you have another computer on a local network, you could backup to the
other computers harddrive and the other computer would backup on yours.
That should be sufficient, as having harddrives fail on both computers at
the same time would be a rare occurance (if it happened you need to go play
the lottery). If you only have the one computer backing up to the non-os
harddrive is a good option, as most failures are not hardware related, they
are software related and in this case you usually only loose the boot/os
drive *disclaimer* all situations are different, and a hardware failure on
your data drive is possible. A CD-RW drive is an option, but with backups
of this size, not the best idea. A writeable DVD is a better option than
CD-RW, but still not ideal. There is also the option of RAID (the
easiest/cheapest being mirroring, the best IMO being RAID 5 as it mirrors
and uses a parity check, but this isn't a cheap option). I have two
computers on a local network (one is mine, and the other my brothers) and we
both have WD 200gb SE drives and we backup to each others computers. In the
worst case, if your data drive goes south, there are data recovery companys
that will take your harddrive and recover everything they can from it (they
are very good, they can recover data written over 6 or 7 times to "hide"
information, so a simple hardware failure should be simple for them, but
they are not cheap by anyones standards). I hope this info helps.

(-: FireFox