Backup man!

I’ve been deliberating lately about data backup, and how to design a solid strategy for both OS and data. All on a tight budget of course… 🙂

Being a photographer and avid net user, I can fill up hard disks with the best of ’em. And having a ‘hoarder’ personality type also means that I don’t like to delete anything. So backup is a subject that has always been dear to me (see my earlier post on backup). But given that I’ve been a pc user for 15 years, I’m doing pretty well. Despite 4 hard disk deaths in that time, I’ve only ever really lost vital data once. And that just reinforced a lesson I already knew. So to me, backup means double or triple redundancy, with one set off site. But that’s in theory. In practice I have a more complicated and not quite complete set-up. Budgetary constraints shoulder most of the blame for that, but now I have decided that it’s time for no more excuses!

So where do we start? Because it’s not just static data we need to protect is it? Considering the nature of software (and here I’m talking both OS and applications) it is now a really big deal to do a clean install. An OS will need a huge number of updates (I’m a Windows user here) and then there’s installing all your apps and configuring the system the way you like it. So to me it seems pretty clear that a backup strategy has to take both OS and data into account. It’s figuring out the right and most cost effective way to do that I find tricky. And we’re never really starting with a clean slate are we. We work with what we have (in the way of drives and inteface options etc). It’d be a far sight easier if we were starting from scratch and had an unlimited budget. But hey, I live in reality-land down here.

My first stab at it led me to install a third SATA hard disk and set the OS up in a mirrored RAID array. My thinking behind this was that in the event of a hard disk failure, I would be up again in a very quick time, with no need to re-install the OS, or my apps. With a small business, I figure this was the basic setup for some sort of reliability and insurance against downtime. For my data I just used a USB external drive. I purchased SyncbackSE for my backup software and finally, burning all my raw files to DVD and storing them offsite completed the picture.

And then I had Vista break on me. Not a hard disk crash, but an OS disastrously corrupted. Irreparable it seemed. Suddenly it dawned on me that my RAID Array was not as useful as I’d thought. Now I just had two buggered OSes. And my single backup drive was getting terribly full. I ended up repairing the Vista installation after a great deal of effort, but it led me to re-examining my whole strategy.

The options are quite endless and equally bewildering. My first thoughts about the OS side of things had me thinking that ‘mirroring’ the drive would be a more sensible option that a RAID array. That would at least have saved me from my recent predicament. But in the event of a total hard disk crash, how up to date would my mirror have been? At least with RAID you don’t have to remember to write a new mirror every day (or every hour). So, pros and cons there, and I’m still not sure what’s the best approach. There’s probably good free mirroring software, but at the moment I haven’t gone that way as my drives are still in a RAID array.

And then there is data. A largish (1TB) USB2 External Drive can be had very cheaply these days, with a dollar to megabyte ratio of about 1:3 or 1:4 (ie. $250 gets 1TB) But there are obvious downsides to that approach. They are stand alone products that, like everything else, wants a USB port, and even with a recent computer, I’m running out of them. And there’s no sharing over the network or any of the other cool functions of a NAS device. I’m also trying to think into the future. Being a photographer and knowing that RAW files are 8 -12MB each (depending of course on the camera – even 21MB I think for a 1Ds MkIII), it’s clear that scalability needs to be addressed. And then we start getting into the budgetary constraints area. I’ve had a look at a few of the cheaper NAS options, and I’m starting to think that’s the way to spend the money. Something like the Netgear SC101 and a few 1TB drives… But it’s a jungle of price and features. My brain is shutting down with information overload and I’ve only been looking at this possibility for a few hours.

So. Any good ideas? I’d love to hear what other high data volume people do. Photographers, movie makers, download kings, whatever. I need some fresh perspective on the whole backup idea.

And of course, we haven’t even touched on online backup…