What's the cheapest and most effective way to backup your data? I have a CD burner, but that's not really enough when you've got 200 GB of stuff. Would be a hella lot of CDs to burn. DVD drives and blanks are still pretty expensive. Is there a better, cheaper way?

> What's the cheapest and most effective way to backup your data? I have a CD
> burner, but that's not really enough when you've got 200 GB of stuff. Would be
> a hella lot of CDs to burn. DVD drives and blanks are still pretty expensive.
> Is there a better, cheaper way?
>

External harddrive...

Hmm those don't look too expensive. But are they any more reliable than regular hard drives? What about tape backups? Does anyone use those anymore?

> What's the cheapest and most effective way to backup your data? I have a CD
> burner, but that's not really enough when you've got 200 GB of stuff. Would be
> a hella lot of CDs to burn. DVD drives and blanks are still pretty expensive.
> Is there a better, cheaper way?

DVD drives only cost $60 now-a-days, and DVDRs are cheaper than CDRs (in the US anyway).

A pack of 100 good CDRs (Taiyo Yuden) is $28-$30. So 28c to 30c per CDR.
A pack of 100 good DVDRs (Ritek G04) is $50, so 50c per DVDR.

However, since a DVDR holds more than 6 CDRs worth of data, it would cost $1.68 (28c * 6) worth of CDRs to hold what one 50c DVDR will hold.

> Hmm those don't look too expensive. But are they any more reliable than regular
> hard drives? What about tape backups? Does anyone use those anymore?
>

External harddrives are fast, reliable, portable and convenient. They are just as reliable as your regular hardrive as long as you're not throwing them around or dropping them. Chances are next to nill that both your data (regular HDD) and your backup (external HDD) will die at exactly the same time. A HDD can save several backups and be erased and re-written time and again.

CD's / DVD's are error prone, unreliable (media/drive quality dependant) and still quite limited in capacity (in comparison to a harddrive). You have to store them under very specific conditions to get even a few years life from them. If you have more than 1 disk of data to backup then spanning over several disks can be a pain - same with restoring data from a spanned backup - especially if you just need to extract 1 file. If you use inexpensive -r's then you need to use new disks for each backup adding to the landfill.

Yeah I was thinking of getting a huge external hard drive, connecting it to backup all my data, and then disconnecting it and keeping it someplace safe until I want to modify it. So is an external drive basically a regular EIDE hard drive but in a special enclosure that connects through USB? It seems like it's cheaper to buy the HD and enclosure separately...

> > Hmm those don't look too expensive. But are they any more reliable than
> regular
> > hard drives? What about tape backups? Does anyone use those anymore?
> >
>
> External harddrives are fast, reliable, portable and convenient. They are just
> as reliable as your regular hardrive as long as you're not throwing them around
> or dropping them. Chances are next to nill that both your data (regular HDD) and
> your backup (external HDD) will die at exactly the same time. A HDD can save
> several backups and be erased and re-written time and again.
>
> CD's / DVD's are error prone, unreliable (media/drive quality dependant) and
> still quite limited in capacity (in comparison to a harddrive). You have to
> store them under very specific conditions to get even a few years life from
> them. If you have more than 1 disk of data to backup then spanning over several
> disks can be a pain - same with restoring data from a spanned backup -
> especially if you just need to extract 1 file. If you use inexpensive -r's then
> you need to use new disks for each backup adding to the landfill.
>

its less cpu hogging than usb2. But I have a generic USB2.0/Firewire EIDE Enclosure myself. It can handle any IDE drive via normal IDE 40pin/80wire cable, has a switched powersupplly in the back so you can turn it on and off, runs off its own ac power. Right now i'm using it for my DVD-RW and it acts just like a normal drive, it even accepts flash upgrades like it was plugged right onto the onboard ide. Very useful stuff.

> Yeah I was thinking of getting a huge external hard drive, connecting it to
> backup all my data, and then disconnecting it and keeping it someplace safe
> until I want to modify it. So is an external drive basically a regular EIDE
> hard drive but in a special enclosure that connects through USB? It seems like
> it's cheaper to buy the HD and enclosure separately...


Yes, that's how I built mine - bought drive and enclosure seperately. Make sure you get USB2 or firewire... or one with both... USB1 is WAAAAYYYY too slow.