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Living Room / Backup Strategy: "The Threes"
« Last post by mouser on May 29, 2011, 12:46 AM »I'm trying to get back into good backup habits. I thought it might be worth documenting a new approach I'm taking.
FIRST A WORD ABOUT RAID:
Note that many people use a RAID approach to keeping their data safe; I have not adopted RAID yet and still have some uneasy feelings about it, but it may indeed be a good alternative solution to part of the goals I am outlining here. HOWEVER -- While RAID does a good job of protecting your data against a hard drive hardware failure, that is only one of the goals of backing up data. The other main goal is to keep backups against accidental modification/deletion/overwriting/corruption of files, which is only discovered days/weeks/months after it occurs without notice.
Three "tiers" of backup software:
Justification:
Where to backup: 3 internal drives
I think a 3-internal-drive pc is the best way to go here:
All backups go from the system and document drive to the internal backup drive, which should be very fast to perform.
Alternatives: You could use an external usb drive for backups, but you want the connection to be fast if you are performing instant versioned backups; an alternative would be to back up from the system drive to the user drive, and vice versa, which is fine if you have enough space.
Lastly I think it make sense to keep copies the lastest full drive images on a removeable hard drive that is left outside of the house. Using a hard drive dock will let you buy 2 hds and swap them every other time with a drive kept offsite. Or you could upload to an online backup space. This will protect from fire/theft.
FIRST A WORD ABOUT RAID:
Note that many people use a RAID approach to keeping their data safe; I have not adopted RAID yet and still have some uneasy feelings about it, but it may indeed be a good alternative solution to part of the goals I am outlining here. HOWEVER -- While RAID does a good job of protecting your data against a hard drive hardware failure, that is only one of the goals of backing up data. The other main goal is to keep backups against accidental modification/deletion/overwriting/corruption of files, which is only discovered days/weeks/months after it occurs without notice.
Three "tiers" of backup software:
- 1. Full disk imaging (software example: Macrium Reflect); backup full drives once per month; scope: all content on all drives; keep a few old images, delete old image to make room.
- 2. Broad document backup (software example; Backup4All); performed weekly or every couple of days (perhaps even daily); scope: all user data documents, even large databases; incremental if space allows; mirrored to spare hd if not; can delete old copies if space is limited.
- 3. Instant versioned/incremental backup (software example: FileHamster); keeps instant copies of every version; scope: small set of important documents that are frequently modified by user.
Justification:
- The full disk imaging is the comprehensive approach that backs up everything; but it takes too long and occupies too much space to perform too frequently.
- The instant versioned/incremental backups are too cpu and space demanding to have run on EVERY file that you might modify (for example if you have large databases that don't version well).
- The broad document backup may be best performed by mirroring directories onto a spare drive, which can be done quickly at the end of each day, occupying little extra space and taking little cpu.
Where to backup: 3 internal drives
I think a 3-internal-drive pc is the best way to go here:
- 1. A super fast system C drive (10k rpm, or solid state drive); 100gb or so.
- 2. A fast user document drive (10k rpm preferably).
- 3. A large backup drive (2tb preferably; speed not too important, but 7200rpm is nice)
All backups go from the system and document drive to the internal backup drive, which should be very fast to perform.
Alternatives: You could use an external usb drive for backups, but you want the connection to be fast if you are performing instant versioned backups; an alternative would be to back up from the system drive to the user drive, and vice versa, which is fine if you have enough space.
Lastly I think it make sense to keep copies the lastest full drive images on a removeable hard drive that is left outside of the house. Using a hard drive dock will let you buy 2 hds and swap them every other time with a drive kept offsite. Or you could upload to an online backup space. This will protect from fire/theft.
