what drive capacity would suit you?

Right now I'm at about 1300 GB. I have one 1 TB drive and one 300GB drive. 300GB is just about completely full and the 1 TB isn't even close.

But another 1 TB drive would be nice. You can never have too much storage. I remember back in the days when I payed over 200 bucks for a 20mb hard drive. I don't mind slapping down 150 to 175 now for 1 TB.

Originally Posted by Nyda

A lot of people record their favourite TV shows. That's not done on VHS tapes anymore, it's done on hard-disks.

Hey, I still tape everything on VHS.

Originally Posted by sean

On the other hand, hard drives fail (I seem to have bad luck with that...) I've started keeping backups in both forms of everything I can.

Yah, but that's why you use an online backup service. Keep everything on hard-drive, not discs, and have a backup of the drives. It's VERY convenient. Hook the movie drive up to WD HD or Xbox 360 or PS3 etc and away you go. or even wi-fi. You can even backup your games on drives, so you can re-burn them if they break, and on some console systems even play games right off the hard-drive.

Discs are a bloody hassle. They are harder to organize. My drive automatically organizes alphabetically, and I can add tags, categories, etc. Without using up 5 square feet of space. Many of my DVD discs are scratched, and/or not working anymore. That's what happens when you let other people use your discs. But that's what they are better for. They aren't better for backing up everything. Not anymore. Just sharing. Even though I'd rather share a USB drive over a DVD disc any day. Hopefully eventually companies will manufacture more USB capable products (steroes, media players, etc.) and we can forget "discs" ever existed, just like "tapes".

Or you can backup all your drives on one huge drive (ie. 2TB+), which most likely won't fail since it's only used rarely for backups.

Online backup services are nice, but usually they have limited space or unlimited space but capped upload speed. It sucks, and can take months to upload stuff, especially from scratch. Otherwise, they are N-E-A-T.

The last drive that failed me had a capacity of 40MB. That's right, megabytes. And it was large at that time
What do you do with your disks?

Well, the first one was a desktop drive that just developed bad sectors semi-naturally I guess, after about 7 years of constant usage. The second one was a laptop drive that also developed bad sectors for no apparent reason. The last one was this one - Cheap way to cool down an external harddrive
I'm still using the last one, though, just isolated the bad sectors. This one could be partially my fault. It was running VERY warm until I added the heatsink pile.

Online backup services are nice, but usually they have limited space or unlimited space but capped upload speed. It sucks, and can take months to upload stuff, especially from scratch. Otherwise, they are N-E-A-T.

Are there online backup services that allow differential backups (rsync)?

Yes, of course there are.

Ah okay, last time I checked was probably in stone age... so .

Originally Posted by cyberfish

just developed bad sectors semi-naturally I guess

Strange, I don't think I ever had any bad sectors on a harddrive. The 40MB drive simply failed to spin up one day. Almost caused me to lose my "MS-DOS startmenu" that day - had a diskette backup which was broken for some reason and a printout - which took me a couple of days to type in again...
Needless to say I improved my backup strategy since then.

My setup. Been using mirrors for years now to keep my data protected from failures.

gg

I don't really understand why people use online backup services. Your data is just being transferred to another drive, via the internet. Why can't you transfer the data yourself to your own backup drive?

Quicker, closer at hand, not limited by space(other than media costs), and free(not including media costs).

Or is the fact that through online backup, your backup will be far away and thus safe, should your house bun down?

Or is the fact that through online backup, your backup will be far away and thus safe, should your house bun down?

Exactly. Or if an earthquake hits your house, or if your computer gets stolen...

Originally Posted by happyclown

I don't really understand why people use online backup services. Your data is just being transferred to another drive, via the internet. Why can't you transfer the data yourself to your own backup drive?

Quicker, closer at hand, not limited by space(other than media costs), and free(not including media costs).

Or is the fact that through online backup, your backup will be far away and thus safe, should your house bun down?

1) You have to purchase lots of hard drives to keep your backup.
2) Hard drives sipher a small amount of power.
3) Hard drives take up space (you can't have an infinite amount of them).
4) Hard drives can break.
5) Your computer (including all its drives) can be damaged or destroyed in accidents, fire, etc.
6) As you run out of space, you have to purchase higher-density drives to replace old ones, not just add new.
7) You could use all the data on your hard drives to store more stuff instead of backups.

There you go. 7 reasons why online backups are the way to go. Usually.

Mine 256+14x128MB
(wow! those number looks huge) :P

That's just enough for my files (games, pics, movies) are in 142 DVDs.

Originally Posted by happyclown

I don't really understand why people use online backup services. Your data is just being transferred to another drive, via the internet. Why can't you transfer the data yourself to your own backup drive?

Quicker, closer at hand, not limited by space(other than media costs), and free(not including media costs).

Or is the fact that through online backup, your backup will be far away and thus safe, should your house bun down?

Besides the reasons already list, the reason is basically "out of sight, out of mind." I don't feel like running mirrors, and spending much more money on that per GB. I'm also confident the backup services are trying their hardest not to lose your data, it will be safe, and will always provide you with a backup. It's their job. I don't have to worry about it.

I don't have the time, discipline, and money to backup all my data all the time. Especially since I'd just end up killing the drives quicker. These companies do backup your data, and you don't have to worry about it if should your harddrive be damaged/destroyed/etc. Local shops charge an arm and a leg to restore data too, lol, not that I couldn't attempt it myself. Still, anyone considering paying an arm and a leg should consider some sort of backup service/device. When you lose an important drive, you lose a lot of time and possibly money.

I've never had data-loss due to fire or hurricane, but *every* HD I've ever owned has eventually failed. An extra 640MB WD Caviar Black is only $80 and most higher-end motherboards come with integrated RAID controllers (on the PCI-e bus no less!). And with a mirror, you're not only protected from a sudden single-drive failure, but you also get a nice boost to disk read throughput.

For protection from nature, I use a safety deposit box (which was already acquired for other stuff).

gg