Originally Posted by
eric34
In the future what is the best way to back things up???Drives quit, discs qiut. How do you do it when you have things you just can't loss???
Soapbox Disclaimer: Over the years, I've used tape, optical, and removable cartridge based hard and soft disks for backup, and as a result I now despise these products for anything but short term backup due to excessive cost relative to data size to be backed up, backup process complexity and restoration time, short drive life/ongoing drive and media maintenance storage/effort required to have a snowball's chance of getting the data off the backup medium, and ongoing product driver support from the manufacturers.
Personally, I find the fastest, most reliable, easiest (but not cheapest) long term method is using RAID drive arrays for my primary drive instead of a single disc. I have a three drive RAID 5 array in my desktop machine to minimize data loss due to single drive failure and a USB connected external single drive to do weekly or monthly snapshot backups of the array via
Acronis TrueImage in the unlikely event the array becomes corrupted. You could also do a RAID 1 mirrored array with two drives for less cost at the expense of total storage capacity.
RAID requires a special drive controller which can be either a discrete add-in controller card (
Adaptec,
3Ware,
Highpoint, etc... ) or integrated into the motherboard (
Intel,
Supermicro,
Asus, etc... ). I also like putting the whole affair into an internal enclosure (such as this
mobile rack) to make drive installation and failed drive replacement easy.