portable hard drive fails from under use

[Rik]

I've never felt safe entrusting my data to others, Mitch.

[pctech]

In a way I agree but I'm just concerned about shelling out another 60 quid on a drive.

TBH I trust Zen more than an American storage device corporation even though a tracert shows the servers appear to be in Ireland but I'd be a little concerned about exhausting my broadband allowance if I had to do a restore.

[Rik]

Plus the speed of the backup is going to be slow.

[Ray]

I agree, Rik, I recently tried out Idrive online storage and to just backup my Outlook pst file of about 1.5GB took nearly 8 hours, I gave it up as a waste of time in the end. With the upload speeds most BB users have it's a total waste of time if you've got a significant amount of data to back up and forget it if you want to back up the whole PC.

[Rik]

Fibre will make it viable, Ray, but anything less and you're going to need a lot of patience.

[Ray]

Indeed, Rik, it should.

[Glenn]

And while you are backing up your .pst file, you use Outlook.

[Technical Ben]

Fibre will make it viable, Ray, but anything less and you're going to need a lot of patience.

I'm guessing, by then, we will be using High Def Video recorders. So that wedding video you want to back up, in 3D, is 30GB alone. Technology moving on and all that. 

[pctech]

Zen are offering a free 14 day trial so I might give it a whirl.

[Steve]

Might be time for one back up

[Rik]

[Ray]

 

[pctech]

It'll do incremental apparently, I may just leave the PC on overnight and let it do its thing.

[Rik]

You mean hatch devilish plots against you?

[pctech]

Perhaps, especially as I've been researching its replacement 

[Rik]

 

[Glenn]

Would this be of interest Mitch? http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/intenso-1tb-2-5-usb-portable-extern/826152

[pctech]

Cheers, looking at the further info on the backup products it looks like the first backup could take some time.

[armadillo]

I would not want to use a HD that is powered by USB. Better to use external power. I use a standard internal hard drive but in an external enclosure.

Take your pick from any standard internal HD from 1TB to 3TB

http://www.scan.co.uk/Shop/Computer-Hardware/All/Hard-Drives-Int/SATA-I-and-II-1TB-3TB

and an enclosure - I use these

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/icy-box-ib-351astu-b-black-aluminium-for-35-pata-and-sata-hdd-plus-usb-20-interface

It comes with a mains power supply.

I have about eight of them. Never had one fail in about as many years. Every time bigger drives come down to a sensible price, I buy one and back up my smaller drives onto it. That way I progressed from 300GB drives to 1.5TB ones. It means everything can be backed up more than once. I see there are now 3TB drives but they are stupidly expensive. 1TB ones are pretty cheap now though.

[Rik]

Next year, the 3TB drives will be, Dill. Think how many copies of my first, 10MB, HD I could fit on one of them - and it cost me £300 in 1982!

[Steve]

I've got a few external 1TBs , and not had any issues yet, great for backups and a clone of the backup.

[Rik]

I wonder how many backup copies we make on average. For me, it's 4 external HDs and one internal daily, plus a further weekly backup. All changed data files are backed up daily, the weekly includes an image of the apps & data drives, I do weekly Acronis images of the OS drive.

[Technical Ben]

HDD prices are so cheap, I cannot see online storage competing.
Why not go for a hot swappable raid server? Raid with redundancy, so if one drive fails, it repairs its self.
You can get cheap 2 disk NAS boxes. These would only support raid 1 or 0. So your only going to get a single copy for backup in a HDD failure. So, 2TB total storage, is 1TB storage, 1TB backup (50%).
With a more expensive NAS box, you can put in more drives, with 3 or more drives, you can use RAID 5 (or 3, 4 ect, but RAID 5 seems best).
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/132657
You can loose 1 disk, and keep all your files. You have 3TB of space, for example. This gives you a better 2TB storage, with 1TB for backup (30% for the backup). Each drive you add increases the amount you can use for storage, and less for backup.

[pctech]

Well, I 'did the math' as they say in Uncle Sam's backyard and a year's subscription to Zen's service is cheaper than an external HDD and the data is backed up on two sets of servers that are geographically diverse and protected by 448-bit blowfish encryption so have taken the plunge and the software is currently building the backup set which is about 2.93GB in size.

Going to leave the machine running overnight to let it upload.

[Technical Ben]

I wonder if my 80gb* would be economical?

Well, I would not need a online service for family pictures. I'd prefer to do entire drives/computers. So HDD seem the only option for me. 

(*No idea how big it is, but my art folder, mainly of digital artwork I've done is nearly 5GB as it is. That's without programs and everything else)