Back-up devices

[Michael C. Stephens]

To the pros,
What is the best back-up system to use to save Files on D.V.D. C.D. Zip Disc
I crashed twice and lost everything had to start all over with Plans.

[Dermot Dempsey]

I think CD's are probably the cheapest and most reliable method right now. You can get them for less then a buck each and you can store 700MB on each. Standard Zip disks don't have nearly the storage capacity and are really pretty expensive when you look at the $/MB of storage. DVD's are still too new to be cost effective yet and you really don't need that much space for backing up plan files.

[Michael C. Stephens]

Thank you Dermot

[Tim]

Michael,

The best way to back up your files is to add another hard drive. Simply open your box, set the jumper to slave and plug it in. Or just buy an external hard drive.

When your C drive crashes (from abuse) your backup is sitting there waiting for you to retrieve the files. I have been running two hard drives for years with no data loss. And it's without a doubt the faster way to recover. It's how all servers are run.

Also you can save ghosting, recovery and backup software there as well.

Money? 50.00 - 250.00 for a hard drive. Cheap backup. CD's **** and I have loss data on them many times. Don't handle them like a fine piece of china, write to them too much and your data is HISTORY!

[Salvador]

Totally agree with Tim,I have been doing the same thing,except i do it with 3 hard drives one for operating system ,another for games and stuff and the third for very special stuff like my plans.
Never had a problem in 4 yrs.
Have a nice day

Salvador

[M.A. Winterton]

What happens when your house burns down etc, you need a portable backup off site, I back up current plans in progress each night to zip compressed, then weekly back up all to CD with cdrws takes 5 CDs now. I have a duplicate set of Cds I rotate with off site. I've had 2 hardrives die in 2 years now, luckly they were primary drives which was just windows and programs the data is on a 2nd hardrive which is old and running out of room, no wonder they only give 12 month guarrantees on drives these days. My Engineer also backs up to CDRW and keeps them out in another outbuilding. He had a employie a few years back who wasn't backing up properly and did a monthes work when a virus hit him, but atleast he had most on the CDs

[shanek]

Little story about cd back-up. I bought a new custom build HP last spring and I backed up all my Chief files on a seperate cd, took a quick look at it and all looked fine but got cocky and didn't open any of the files. Come to find out ALL of the files were corrupt. I had back up from previous dates but still I lost work that had to be caught up. I've went to a 2nd hard drive on a recomendatrion from a freind that is a programer and I keep copies on dvd's. shane

[Michael C. Stephens]

Thanks to all replies you've got me thinking
Michael

[Dermot Dempsey]

A second hard drive is a great solution to the most common problem, a hard drive failure. There are other situations that can happen that this will not protect against. Some of these catastrophic failures can include a power surge that wipes out both hard drives at the same time (you should always have a good surge protector to prevent this), a nasty virus that infects both drives, fire, flood, or theft (if some one walks off with your computer they get both drives). Having backups on either CD, DVD, or other media can help protect against these. To be extra safe, having a backup in a different location can also help.

It's kind of up to you to decide what level of protection you need and what the cost of losing your data is worth to you. We have to be extremely careful with the source code here for Chief Architect because we have over 12 years of R&D invested that we wouldn't want to lose.

[Geoff Francis]

A removable hard drive allows you to alternate the hard disks in the second hard drive bay - you rotate a couple of hard disks through your scheduled backups and one should always be off-site.