I know this isn’t a gay website related question but since there are some geeks on this board I hope its OK if I ask this. I have been looking for a good hard drive backup utility, something that I can set up to copy the files I want (not every single file on my drive) when I want and where I want. Does such a utility exist? Oh, and if its free that would be even better! It seems like every backup utility I’ve found has some quirk that makes it hard or cumbersome to use.
Re: The best hard drive backup utility is…
You don’t say how much data there is. You really can’t effectively backup 1 TB+. I mean it’s possible but the best way is to RAID it, use RAID-5 or RAID-1 for your basic storage, and maybe backup using standard equip say once or twice a month. The amount of time to actually restore a multi-TB backup is well insane. None of the big guys focus on backups last I checked because there’s just too much data and it changes too fast. Get a Blu-Ray writeable and just drag-drop - it will likely take you several hours at best. Drives on personal computers are pretty hard to kill these days.
Re: The best hard drive backup utility is…
I actually don’t have that much date… maybe 500GB. But I don’t need to copy everything, just certain folders. I guess I should be more organized and keep everything I want to backup under one master folder and then just copy that every month. It would just be nice if there was a backup utility where you could list the folders you want to backup, plus where and when to copy them so it did it automatically.
Re: The best hard drive backup utility is…
I just discovered mozy.com, which is a cloud-based backup. For “personal” users (i.e., one computer with no external drives) it will backup unlimited amounts of data for $5/month. You install a small utility, configure which directories to back up (it won’t backup the program files directory) and off it goes. If you have a ton of data it might take a couple days to do the first full backup, but then it runs updates twice a day, backing up all changes since the last time it backed up. It’s completely in the background and you don’t even know it’s running.
We also have a collection of raid 5 arrays that back up our video content, and tape backup backing up the RAIDs. I’m here to tell you, RAID-5 is not as infallible as it appears.
Re: The best hard drive backup utility is…
Thanks for the tip.
Re: The best hard drive backup utility is…
gaybucks_chip recommended EMC Retrospect to me a while back.
It is by far the best utility I’ve used. With that said, it was a nightmare to get licensed. I had a trial Retrospect HD version and during my trial period they stopped selling the HD version & basically refused to sell me a license. This left me hanging for a while with no way to restore from back up. Thankfully I didn’t need to before I was able to get a license. They’ve since released newer versions under the Roxio name:
I find their site a bit confusing but for a basic set up (desktop and attached drives) you would probably want the Retrospect® for Windows Professional Version.
Here’s a comparison.
Their more advanced versions are quite pricey. The more basic (yet robust) version is around $139.
Hope that helps.
As for the online back up services, I’ve never used one but have read lots of nightmare reviews from users who are backing up a good amount of data. Apparently they’ll shut you off without warning leaving you without access to your files.
Re: The best hard drive backup utility is…
I’m with gaybucks_chip on this one.
something like mozy or livedrive is really great for this. with livedrive you get TRUE unlimited speed and space for 7 USD/mo. add another 10 USD/mo and you get access to FTP with same specs… One of their largest client has crossed the 20 TB milestone…
Re: The best hard drive backup utility is…
Seth, thanks for the tip on the online backup solutions… I found some disturbing stuff about Mozy.
We’ve been very happy with Retrospect. The only issue we’ve got is now our tape backup solution is getting kind of long in the tooth (320GB tapes are kinda small when you have 6 and 8 terabyte arrays!) Everyone says that tape is “old school” but I like it because you don’t have the sort of risks of mechanical failure you do with hard drives, and you can make multiple copies of the same backup at low cost and store them offsite.
This livedrive does look interesting for day-to-day backup of local machine files. I think for us, the combination of that with the Retrospect solution we’re using for the arrays and the weekly backups of the machines on the network is probably the best combination of ease-of-use and reliability.