Preserving your Data?

Anyone have a good system in place they would be willing to share on how they preserve their data from hard drive corruption and data rot? 10 years ago I use to think burning everything to dvd-r media was the answer. Of course, we know now that dvd-r media does not last. I just keep thinking there has got to be a better way of preserving data. I have considered online backup services but have heard some bad stories and upload rates are really slow. Like taking 6 months to backup one hard drive. My ISP (Cox) has an unlimited online data backup plan if you update to their fastest connection. The upload would be faster, but still not the greatest. But they cap bandwidth at 400 GBs. Plus, not sure if it is safe to backup copyright materials and such to ISP backup service. So that basically just leaves me with hard drives, which could fail at any moment, new or old. Anyone have some good solutions or methods? I have thought about RAID but if you have a major surge it could wipe out all your hard drives at once. If many filesharing sites go down it will be even more crucial to preserve our data since we won’t beable to redownload.
Answer #1
kizer22 replied: I have thought about RAID but if you have a major surge it could wipe out all your hard drives at once. If many filesharing sites go down it will be even more crucial to preserve our data since we won't beable to redownload.
A UPS combined with RAID (1/5 or 6) will solve this (Puts your computer on a different circuit)
Answer #2
The best and cheap way is to backup your data. External HDD’s would be a good choice.
Answer #3
kizer22 replied: So that basically just leaves me with hard drives, which could fail at any moment
Yeah, But the odds of both HDDs to fail at the same time are like 1 in a million so it’s not as bad as you put it.
Also, There are S.M.A.R.T monitoring apps (such as hdtune pro) which allows you to monitor the HDDs health, Doing
a checkup every few days will give you a good indication to whether they’re going bad or not, Granted an HDD can
have a sudden failure even if there are no prior signs, But it’s still better than nothing. Using an external HDD is the
right way to go IMO. I recommend Samsung as their HDDs never failed me. Just use a good backup app such as syncback pro (stick to the NOPE release) I suggest you get one that has USB3 (backwards compatible too) as it’s much
faster, If you have a desktop from the last few years, You could just add a USB3 expansion card to it, I think there
are some for laptops too (needs an expresscard slot)
If your extra paranoid, Get 2 HDDs and store one of em in a safe deposit box in the bank and take it out for updating every few weeks (so in case the in-house one would get stolen you’d still have your data) you could also use online backup in addition for small stuff. I’d also like to point out that physical handling is very important, Never attempt to just yank the cable from it and do your best not to accidentally hit or drop it.
kizer22 replied: I have thought about RAID but if you have a major surge it could wipe out all your hard drives at once.
RAID mirroring is not made for backups, If a certain file get’s corrupted or accidentally deleted then the same happens
on the other drive/s (automatically), It’s intended for redundancy in servers, So if the main HDD goes out, Another (which contains the exact same data) takes over (means a lot less downtime) Now just for the record, A power surge cannot
“wipe” an HDD, It can however fry it’s circuit board, Leaving it unusable (But the data can still be recovered if you got a small fortune) but it really depends on the PSU (power supply), If you got a desktop with a bad quality PSU, Then it can certainly happen, These are usually not very reliable, Less resistant to surges and have no short circuit protection (which is very important, This protection prevents the PSU from frying other components when it goes out)
Edit: Just a few more things I forgot to mention about external HDDs.
There are 2.5″ and 3.5″ ones:
2.5 = Much smaller & portable,USB powered, No power cable needed, Capacities goes up to 1TB.
3.5 = Much larger and heavier, Uses a power cable too, Capacities goes up to 3TB, Cheaper than 2.5″ (price>capacity wise)
An external HDD is basically a standard HDD inside an enclosure, So you can either buy it in one piece or buy both in separate (which will probably be more expensive)
Answer #4
Back up your files to two different external hard drives if you’re worried about one dying. Amazon cloud drive for important files as a cloud storage solution, they ain’t going nowhere.
Answer #5
Amazon cloud would seem like a good option but if you have lots of files it can be very expensive. From the Amazon cloud website it would cost $1000 per year just to have 1 tb of online back up space with amazon. Seems pretty steep to me.