Good Back Up Practices

[mcs328]

What's a good backup practice nowadays? Supposed you have 500 gigs of archive data. It's not saved anywhere else. Would you copy it to an external HD with a USB 2.0, USB 3.0, or SATA interface? Or DVDs? Blu-Ray?

I know someone who was asked this question at work. He suspects the 1 terabyte internal HD that is networked accessed by people who work on contract proposals is going to fail. The server equipment that HD sits on is old and he also suspects that this will give up the ghost too. They don't take tape backups of this drive.

I suggested they get a new HD and copy all the data. Then make physical backups.

[Chgoman]

I'd say the easiest way for that much data would be an external HD with an automatic backup program.

[gwilks98]

I'm not one to comment on backup policy, but as a security guy, I can tell you that you shouldn't keep your backups forever for legal reasons. 5-8 years is generally what I've heard for data retention. Unsolicited advice, but I hope it helps.

[mcs328]

AFAIK, they don't have a backup policy at all which is why the question was brought up.

[Cubsfan]

For one, backups should be both on and off site. An external hard drive isn't a lot of good if the place burns down.

They also have to be regular. An attached external hard drive backed up at some interval is a great solution. You could go with an online backup solution for your offsite backup, or simply get two external hard drives and just swap them out every week or so.

[Chgoman]

That's what I do since I need a backup of my business documents for 5 years or so. I have an external harddrive that keeps it local for quick recovery if needed and Carbonite online for my offsite backup in case of a fire or something like that. My backup is only 40GB or so though.

I did have a hard drive fail once before I started keeping the external backup. I was able to retrieve it all from Carbonite, but it took about a week to download all the data which was a pain. That's why I started the external hard drive as well.

[cruelpupet]

If your asking about backups for a small company, id say a NAS (Do NOT buy a Buffalo), and maybe a tape backup every once in a while for offsite and recovering old versions.

For a personal PC, id say get a RAID1 in your PC, and a 2.5" external drive that you leave at work 99% of the time.

Another option Ive been thinking of is getting new routers with USB ports and loading them with DDWRT, and set up a site to site VPN to backup to eachother. Only problem is I can easly fill up 1TB and my father probably could as well (he would have the other router).