backing up/external storage

[wetdog]

i want to free up space on my lappy and back up info.
whats the best way to go, external hard drive or one of them one click back up thingys? a large storage capacity of 1TB or over, or a couple of smaller ones, say 500 GIG?

a link to your suggested route/device would be nice.

seen a Samsung 500 GIG external hard drive in tesco for ?49.99, plus the usual on ebuyer.

Ta,
mick.

[nibblitz]

Even if you backup to another hard disk, that backup hard disk could go tits up..

I backup to hard disks at home, but Ive also recently started using my free online backup storage service with Virgin, Im on the 50mb service so I have unlimited storage space, yea it takes what seems like forever to upload stuff to it, but Im really happy to know that even if my house blows up, all my precious digi photos & home videos will always be totally safe & always retrievable..

[mattbest1986]

The guy above has gone a bit OTT but he's right. But to have Virgin's services you'll have to be paying per month = tons of wasted cash... i would stick to a external HDD Scan.co.uk is the best for PC gear.

[masur123]

Giganews have just chucked in a back up service called Dump Truck. If anyone knows about storage, its those guys

[Egren71]

Hello wetdog
As i am a bit paranoid, and anything connected to the web always has the possibility of coming under attack, i like to have my backups not connected to the web.
Also backups to the web are very slow compared to local backup.
And as nibblitz says if you use one disk to backup to there is always the possibility that it could fail.

So for me the questions comes down to:-
1. Are you backing up or just copying to somewhere else to make room.
2. What are you backing up and how important is it that you don't loose it.
3. How much can you afford to spend.

If you are copying to make space (1) then any external hard drive will do. If the data on the drive is going to need to be accessed very regularly then a faster connection type would be better ie eSATA or USB3 if your lappy supports it. Otherwise USB2 or USB1 if your lappy is very old.
If you are properly backing up (2) then get something with RAID capability of some sort. RAID1 as a minimum. That way if one drive fails as nibblitz said then you would still have all your data on the mirrored drive. Of course you loose the storage of one drive in RAID1 but you do have a safety net for your data.
If you have lots of money and want to back up properly then there are better versions of RAID and NAS.

Personally as money is an issue i have 2 external hard drive enclosures with a 1TB drive in each and use software on my computer to backup the same data to both of them. Each enclosure was bought as i could afford it.

Another possibility for you since i know you have experimented with linux is if you have a spare (or old) PC that you could put some fairly big drives in then there is a version of linux called FreeNAS that you could put on it and build your own NAS. This way you would have storage on your own network which would be accessible on your network. Or if you feel like experimenting you could put NAS software on a standard Linux of your choice install. Of course the problems with NAS is that they are on the network so there are security issues for them.

Whatever you choose i would suggest you get a bigger drive than you think you need as you will always eventually fill it up. And as the price difference between 500GB and 1TB is minimal if it was me i would get the 1TB.

[wetdog]

cheers dude.

mick.