how do u backup or where.

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My pictures [family] is over 25 gigs.
I do have 2 hard drives, and the docs are on the second one.

Must I move it unto dvd's.
What do you do?
 
The best thing that you can do is to have an off-site backup. Having a backup in your home is a good step in the right direction.

I bought myself a 1.5TB external drive a few months ago, backed up all my important data, and gave the drive to my brother. Unfortunately the hard drive prices are through the roof at this moment. You might be able to get a cheap on at Makro.

You can probably do the same with DVD's, but I've had bad luck with writable CD's that didn't last more than like 3 years :(
 
Nope. Writable CD's/DVD's don't last forever.
It mostly depends on the way the DVD's was manufactured + what materials they used.

Some reviews say that they can last like 30 years or so, but again it depends on a number of things.

Non-writable CD/DVD's will last much much longer.
 
RAID-Z + RSynch + ZFS Snapshots.

ZFS snapshots allow you to go back to the file system at the time the snapshot was taken.

If you really care about backups, do a read about ZFS (RAID-z). It isn't like other raid systems, the whole reason Sun microsystems started developing it is because large data centres realized that traditional RAID system (from the likes of Adaptec, etc.) actually had bit corruption which the RAID companies themselves said they could not fix (it is called bit rot and there is no way to fix it for a conventional RAID system).

The end result was a data integrity centred file system, ZFS which implements software based RAID(s), RAID-z (mirror/striping).

That coupled with ZFS snapshots and you have backups of the file system.

You could build a NAS that uses RAID-z (mirror) which is equivalent to RAID-1 and create snapshots. HP server that used to sell for R1.4K would be the ideal server for such a device. Buy 2 if you are really paranoid and put them in different locations.

NexentaStor would be the ideal OS for a NAS that would serve as a backup solution for your situation.
 
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How come there is no decent port of zfs to linux? It looks appealing, but I have no intention of learning solaris and I prefer linux to bsd. This looks like a sensible port for linux. Dont understand why there is not a decent effort to port it to linux. btrfs does not seem to be getting far.
 
Depending on how much you care about backing those up, I might suggest looking at something like Dropbox. Otherwise, just try and memorize as many of those documents and photos, you'll end up losing data some or other time doesn't matter what your backup routine is, I've learned to live with it.
 
ghoti said:
How come there is no decent port of zfs to linux? It looks appealing, but I have no intention of learning solaris and I prefer linux to bsd. This looks like a sensible port for linux. Dont understand why there is not a decent effort to port it to linux. btrfs does not seem to be getting far.
Click to expand...

Because the Linux kernel is GNU licensed and ZFS Apache license. They aren't compatible. Some projects have tried to port ZFS so it doesn't need to be a kernel module but it requires heavy modification. There is a project that ported it completely as a Linux kernel module but only the source code is provided as the actual license infringement occurs with the compilation of a Apache licensed module into the Linux kernel.

Brtfs has been making more progress recently but it is years away from ZFS. Mainly because ZFS was developed by a dedicated group of developers (developers employed by Sun Microsystems).

FreeBSD and Solaris are the only 2 operating systems that support ZFS well.. FreeBSD for example has recently ported ZFS v28 and ironed out all the bugs. It is available now as a kernel patch or next year at the official release of FreeBSD v9 and the refresh release of 8. FreeNAS should also have ZFS v28 at that point.

ZFS v28 is pretty much the best version at this point. The only additions made to the file system subsequently is encryption. However if you use FreeBSD, Geli is available, which is stable and provides encyption.

FreeBSD > Linux when it comes to servers IMHO. I also haven't failed to notice this on wikipedia:
Wikipedia: FreeBSD said:
In a Netcraft survey published 1 March 2011, the top three most reliable Web hosting company sites for the month of February 2011 (the most recent month for which figures are available as of March 2011) were all found to be running FreeBSD on their servers.
Click to expand...
 
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ghoti said:
How come there is no decent port of zfs to linux? It looks appealing, but I have no intention of learning solaris and I prefer linux to bsd. This looks like a sensible port for linux. Dont understand why there is not a decent effort to port it to linux. btrfs does not seem to be getting far.
Click to expand...

OpenSuse 12.1 already has btrfs support by default and Fedora should be implementing it in F17. I really can't wait until it becomes more common and they start giving it some attention.
 
Robertvv said:
Must I move it unto dvd's.
What do you do?
Click to expand...
No, count on HDD to fail and you won't be disappointed; it's why everyone above me has been blathering on and on :rolleyes: about filesystems and such. But you want to know what to do and not so much learn about storage esoterica so, if your 25GB worth of family pix, etcetera is worth a damn to you, there are two definitely worth-it things you can do:


  1. Ignore DVD and go straight to Blu-ray, Esquire have a Sony unit for under a grand. Slap that into your system and backup to offline media the right way As your [-]crap[/-] valued media :p is already at 25GB, you may as well just jump straight to the double-layer disks.
  2. Go online: Spideroak will sell you 100GB for a whole $100 which, very pessimistically rounding up is in the region of R70/month. They also designed their system around NOT being able to see your [-]crap[/-] "stuff" so you're in the same place, privacy wise, that you would be on your own PC anyway. And you can get to your media via 'droid or iToy.

And that will sort you out for, I would guess, quite some time, yes? :p
 
Your photos are 25GB, try 550GB for 6 years of photos.

My backup regime consists of three (2x 1TB + 1x 500GB) external hard drives. One is a pure backup using TimeMachien on Mac, but also includes my photos. The second hard drive is a copy of all my photos, itunes library and documents, stored off-site. The third is a small 500GB 2,5inch portable hard drive containing my last 4 years of photos, documents and a bit of space for copy/transfer between computers. The small portable is always with me.
 
Put it onto 2x 32GB flash drives.
Put them away nicely and should 1 fail, the other will be ok, what is the chances of both failing, including the originals on the original HDD...
 
Robertvv said:
My pictures [family] is over 25 gigs.
I do have 2 hard drives, and the docs are on the second one.

Must I move it unto dvd's.
What do you do?
Click to expand...
For an archive that small I'd keep one copy on an external hdd and another copy on a USB flash drive which I would give to someone to hold on to. I'd also look into putting a third copy in the cloud. The second copy on the USB is essential because it's kept off site.
 
I am surprised no one mentioned it.

Picasa offer 20GB of online photos storage for only 5$ a year....
 
Photo archives: 25Gig Storage on Skydrive,50Gig Storage on Box.net
Documents: on Dropbox

All of this is also on DVD and a lovely NAS running RAID10
 
adrive.com 50Gb free storage.

Still havent managed to upload all my stuff there - thanks for the reminder though
 
Robertvv said:
You mean a cd/dvd does not last forever?
Click to expand...

Nope.

You do get archival quality cd/dvd media from a few of the manufacturers but even they don't last forever but should last long enough. You should still follow proper storage & handling instructions though. Verbatim 95355 UltraLife 4.7 GB 8x Gold Archival Grade DVD-R is one example.
 
I use Windows Home Server 2011 to backup everything on my PC's at home. Works perfectly without any problems.
 
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bar1 said:
I am surprised no one mentioned it.

Picasa offer 20GB of online photos storage for only 5$ a year....
Click to expand...

If you copy all your pictures to your Android phone, link with wifi and use Google+ instant upload you can get all 20+ gig for free :)

I have a free 50 gig Box.com account because I bought a Xperia Phone. All my documents(including ID/Passport photostats) are in Dropbox.
 
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