Backing up Data what do you use

[GNEP]

HDDs on a second machine for critical-and-often copies; less often onto CD-R (but still regularly). For stuff that's REALLY critical, and relatively small, I bung it on to one of my personal network drives at work via the Citrix connection from home and let them worry about daily etc backups

[daemorok]

At the moment im using a hard drive chassis, I keep a 200 gig in it most of the time. When I need to do a backup i have a spare carrier with a 120gig drive in it. reboot swap drives, copy data

[bibble]

backup .... hmmmmm yes i need to o one of those

[agallag]

Robocopy to a share on the network works great. Easily scripted, and pretty reliable.

[MultimediaMan]

We have gone to RAID-based NAS (Network Attached Storage)units for most of our site's nightly backups... beats the hell out of tape in terms of speed and reliability.

Backups that used to take 2-3 hours now run in about 10 minutes...restores are about the same. And, the backups can be automated to hash several times per day (Partial backups of files that have been altered): so instead of a "nightly" backup, you can conceivably set the NAS to back up every 3,6, 8 or 12 hours to have even better disaster recovery characteristics.

I store all of my critical files on a RAID1 array on my fileserver: the drives are well-cooled and run on a UPS-protected circuit.

[Marshmallowman]

One DVD will hold all my critical stuff, the rest can be reinstalled, good enough for my home system.

But we have a couple of DAT tapes that backup overnight at work, pretty crappy actually since just recovering some files from a small misshap is a huge hassles, but I guess its mainly for disaster recovery, I have hinted on occasion a couple of HDD's would be a lot easier.

[Wombat]

HDs would be easier, but they're not as safe. Tapes just tend to be a lot more physically durable.

[dbdg]

Hard Drives and CD-R's, need to find a better solution though as it is manual at the moment and I need way to many CD-R's

[VJ]

Manual to CD (now made the switch to DVD). I only backup my data and I make sure I have installation files for all the software I need.
In the (unlikely) event of problems, it takes some time to restore, but I won't have lost files...


Jörg

[Kurt]

Originally posted by Wombat
HDs would be easier, but they're not as safe. Tapes just tend to be a lot more physically durable.

Not really... if you want durability, it M.O. all the way. Be prepared to pay the price though...the 9.1GB drives don't come cheap...

[Marshmallowman]

If You drop a tape in its case down a flight of stairs, chances are it will still be ok. That is not going to happen with a HDD it'll be dead.