Just for an update, after 7 months I now have 90,351 files backed up which is 290gig. They are all current and off site.

"Carbonite is currently $50/year for unlimited storage space so that price for off site, backed up & secure data is a very good value and one that easily guarantees peace of mind"

Be aware that Carbonite does not allow for archiving! Once your data is moved or deleted from your local drives it will be deleted from Carbonite after 30 days.

Carbonite also slows your local HDD performance especially if the file marking feature is on.

Aside from the slow backup performance (I'm on FIOS 20/5) I did not find it a suitable means for video file backup.

Years ago I had my computer stolen Not only did they take the computer, but also the backup floppys. At the time I was selling software we wrote, and had I not had full off-site backups I would have been out of business. So I learned (or more correctly, reinforced) a valuable lesson about the importance of offsite backups.

Now that I am doing a lot of photography and videography I feel just as stongly about the value of offsite backups - but it has been prohibitively challenging for me because of the shear sizes and effort involved. Until now.

Here is what I am in the process of implementing. My goal is to make daily onsite, and periodic offsite backups effortless enough that I will actually perform them:

1. I have set up a Windows Home Server (WHS) which automatically backs up my video PC, and my other two PCs every night. I have repurposed an old Pentum 4 and two 500GB IDE drives to build the WHS. I added a gigabit network adapter, so with the cost of the WHS software my total out of pocket was about $130. This is working perfectly. Because of the extremely efficient way WHS does it backups, I am able to maintain a month's worth of backups (7 dailies, 3 weeklys, and 1 monthly) in about 600-700Mb of disk space. This is for all three PCs.

2. When video projects are completed I move them to the 250GB "Nearline Archive" drive in my Video PC. When that fills, I move the oldest to offline storage via removable external drives to which I maintain an online index. I use Treepad Plus for building and storing the index. I wish there was a way to move projects and media to nearline and offline storage AND maintain links using Media Manager. If this were the case, I would go to MM and tell it to open Project XYZ, and it would tell me to insert disk "Archive 3". But I digress.

3. The part I am in the process of implementing now is to have WHS automatically create a weekly snapshot of the WHS backups on a removable 1TB drive which I will store offsite in my safety deposit box. Initially I will only have two drives that I rotate. The WHS backup contains all media for current projects, my entire photo and music collection, my C: drive OS and programs - basically everything on my three PCs.

I just purchased two trayless hot swap drive bays, which will let me hot swap sata drives in my video PC, and in my WHS PC. I will be purchasing the 1TB drives in the coming weeks, and will start the offsite storage part of my plan then.

Jerry

I agree that online backup isn't ready for the average consumer. I bought an external SATA docking station for $30 bucks, two 1TB drives for $99 each and Acronis TrueImage for under $50. Total investment less than $300.

You can run a backup every night (or as often as you want). You can image the whole drive or individual files (or a combination of both). I sync both drives each day (usually!) and physically store them in two different places. Now I have 3 copies of my data (1 on the PC hard drives, and 1 each on the 1TB drives). The chances of all of the drives going bad at the same time are nil, not statistically relevant. Same thing for some external event to ruin all three drives (hurricane, earthquake, tornado, etc.). If you need to restore, it can happen in under 30-45 minutes, and I've got 200GB or so.

So, for $300 and a literally a minute or two of work every day, I can sleep at night knowing that my data and system is safe. Virus protection and other threats is a different can of worms!

I certainly know the value of backup, no matter where it is. BUT... is it me or does anyone else feel the same way about the (lack of) quality of the current drives?

I have had two mechanical failures this year. One was a Maxtor 500 GB drive which was 11 months old and the other was a Western Digital 450 GB drive which was 15 months old.

Fortunately the SMART technology warned me of one of the failures so I just about got everything off of the Maxtor but the Western Digital just froze.

So, just who has the most reliable drives out there (that are affordable?). And how reliable (and secure) are the on-line backup sites?

TomG

The most reliable online backup is Iron Mountain Connected Online Backup (COB). It backs up to two separate geographic locations and is run by a company that services America's largest companies.

I used the above for many years with 100% satisfaction, before switching to Mozy Pro for Windows and OS X which is much less expensive and has great flexibility and management.

There is also Mozy Home unlimited backup for $4.95/month, still good.

None of these services are suitable for backing up large video files (although it can be done).

There are many other things to save though from .veg's to Outlook PST files (which are backed up correctly and incrementally), to PSDs, scripts, downloaded software, and much more.

jc said

"Digital data isn't truly backed up unless it exists in at least two different forms in two different places. "

i agree entirely, especially the two different formats!

It's probably not within most home users budgets, but Windstream in our area has EIA (Ethernet Internet Access) which gives syncronous upload/download speeds of either 3Mbps, 5Mbps, and 10Mbps. It's a lot faster than most T1 lines used to be and the 3Mbps package is a good bit cheaper.

If your ISP isn't offering Fiber there's a chance they have something like EIA.