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5 Options for Backing Up My Home PC

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I'm recovering from losing both the power-supply and hard disk of my home PC after we just moved house. I'll cut a long story short by saying that there was a loud bang and smoke coming out of my Shuttle XPC after I unpacked it from moving. 

After a couple of relatively expensive trips to Fry's, the machine is now operational and this recent event has me thinking about taking backups a little more seriously. One of the problems I have (which I'm sure many people share) is the sheer quantity of data held on the PC. If I add up all of the photos, videos, music and other stuff on the machine it's reaching near 60Gb - and this grows exponentially on a monthly basis. My question is - what is the best backup strategy for this? Here are the options I've been toying around with:

1. Backup to DVD - cheap, but 60Gb / 4.7Gb = 12.7 DVDs to backup all the data. I guess I could re-organize the libraries so I'm only backing up the incremental changes, but then this makes restoring difficult.

2. Backup to Dual Layer DVD - see option #1, buy new DVD recorder and divide number of DVDs required by half. Better, but still lots of media...

3. Buy additional 300Gb Hard Disk and setup a RAID 0 mirror. Cheap and easy to maintain, but won't survive the PC being stolen, flooded, burned in a fire etc.

4. Use Foldershare to distribute libraries across multiple PCs. This has the main advantage of not requiring any regular backups, but if any of the files get corrupted this can start spreading across machines without me noticing (until I have to show that all important slideshow one day to my family :).

5. Go out any buy some tape backup hardware and a ton of tapes. Most reliable form of backup, but expensive. I read a blog article about using my viedocamera and 4mm digital tapes to "reverse backup" through the firewire port, but this sounds like it could be slow (and each tape has only a 20Gb capacity).

My gut is to implement #3 and #4, make another trip to Fry's and purchase #2 and record to DL DVD every month or so. 

Any other options I could consider?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2006
    How about USB based External Hard disks?

    Get a IOmeaga USB HDD and do a backup every month.

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2006
    I do 4 but in addition I backup the replicated stuff on the second PC every day (just on the same disc on that computer, and just a differential backup) so that I can go back in time and access old versions of files, in case an error spreads via Foldershare.

    I really hope that Vista will have a better story there. I believe the volumne shadow copy service for normal files, which should solve the "uuups, by mistake I deleted/changed an important file" problem and would just leave us with protection against disc failure...
  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2006
    I saw someone else blogging on this the other day...

    http://www.allmydata.com/

    The idea is great but I don't really want to share all my data with the world - encrypted or not - now, can I have it in a LAN version?
  • Anonymous
    January 21, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 21, 2006
    One quick and easy solution, and someone else suggested, is an external USB HDD. You can find 250GB for $100-150 pretty easily.

    I do nightly backups using Windows Scheduled Tasks and WinZip. This works pretty well. Of course you can decide to back up less often, depending on how much and often your files change and how much risk you want to take. I leave my machine on 24x7, and my backup runs while I'm sleeping. My wife's machine is not on 24x7, so it is scheduled to backup each day around noon.

    Another suggestion would be, if your budget permits, is to also get a second external USB HDD. Then you can keep one off-site, at a family members' or friends house, and alternate periodically, like maybe once a week or once a month. Combined with daily automated backups, this method will reduce your odds of losing data to nearly zero.
  • Anonymous
    January 21, 2006
    The new Windows OneCare beta (http://www.windowsonecare.com/), with an external USB HD is working great for me.

    All automated, slient and just seems to work...
  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2006
    I bought a cheap PC and stuck it in my parent's basement in NY. Then, using FolderShare, I automagically sync my data between my Corpnet machine, my tablet, my home pc, and my machine in NY.

    What's the likelihood that an earthquake will destroy california and a hurricaine will destroy NY at the exact same time?