08.11.05

Personal Backup Solutions

Posted in tech at 3:13 am by mridley

Since my recent hard disk meltdown (and lack of any backup) I have been trying to research and plan how I can handle things better going forward once I get my system back up and running. In the old days, it was relatively easy to just make floppy disk backups of critical data. Alas, those days are gone.

I’m not against paying a (reasonable) amount of money for a commercial software product, but I’m not even sure what that product would do. While I know that I don’t need to backup every file on my PC, I do have several hundred GB of data that I’d like backed up, or at least archived. I suppose the conventional wisdom these days would be to back up to DVD, but even still that’s a LOT of DVDs.

I’m not sure what my other options are, though. For a commercial setup, a tape library would be the logical choice. I don’t think a DLT/LTO/AIT-2 library is particularly economical for home use, however. I’ve thought about setting up a dedicated fileserver to store all my data with RAID-5 and perhaps some kind of snapshot/versioning system but that’s still potentially failure prone.

I’d like to use a network-based backup solution that would stream to an off-site service provider. There are commercial providers such as EVault and Arsenal Digital, but their services and pricing are not geared for home users. I’ve looked for personal use services along these lines but haven’t found any that would work for me. It seems that they are mostly geared for people who only need a few GB of backup, but that won’t work for me. I’m not really concerned about the network speed issue of broadband. I know it will take a while (maybe a long while) to get the initial dump done, but once that’s done the incrementals shouldn’t be so bad. And in the event of a massive crash where I need to restore an entire disk’s contents, I am OK with it taking several days. But I don’t see anyone offering that kind of service.

I don’t have a solution yet, I’m still in research mode. If any readers have suggestions or pointers to products and services (commercial or freeware) I’d be very interested. I’ve started a furl tag for things I want to try out and/or research further.

Hopefully I’ll have some more updates on this topic in the near future as I figure out what I’m going to setup for myself when I start to rebuild my main PC.

Tags: Backup, DisasterRecovery, DR

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