Re: Backup question

From: Phil (rotsky_at_nospam.org)
Date: 06/29/05 

Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 10:16:36 +0200

Moe Trin wrote:

> For a home user WHO IS SKILLED with hardware, a reasonable solution might
> be to TEMPORARILY install a second hard drive of suitable capacity, and
> copy the files to that drive, then remove it and store it in "a safe
> place". The TWO problems with that is the risk of constant fiddling with
> the disk
> and guts of the computers, AND the fact that the connectors have a finite
> life (admittedly measured in the hundreds of mate/demate cycles).

Actually, a USB or Firewire external hard drive is fairly cheap (per Mb),
easy to connect when needed (just plug it in - no skills required) and easy
to replace should *it* go wrong. The chances of both your main drive and
the external drive failing at the same time is remote (though not
impossible if caused by, say, a nearby lightning strike - I speak from
experience). Also, such drives are small enough that you can easily store
the thing off-site should you want only to do, say, weekly backups.

I'm currently implementing backup for my Mac (which holds around 50Gb of
digital photos). My solution is 2 USB hard drives. One stays connected to
the machine which uses a cron job to copy everything from my home dir to
the hard drive overnight. Once a week or once a fortnight, this external
drive gets swapped with one stored at a friend's house just down the road
(so if we get a flood or earthquake then I'm fucked - but as we live on a
hill in Normandy, both are unlikely). However, all the original versions of
my images are also stored on two DVDs.