A good data backup solution?

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hmpws

19 posts

Geek

# 42383 3-Oct-2009 13:30

I am not looking for offsite storage, just a good configuration for backing up data in case of a hard drive failure (without losing too much space). This will probably be part of the HTPC I am upgrading to in a bit.

I have considered like RAID5, but it doesn't seem like it would work so well in real life when 1 of the drives actually fails? What other solutions are there?

freitasm

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# 260815 3-Oct-2009 15:05

RAID is not actually backup... It may prevent interruptions in case of a drive failure but you still risk losing your data. You probably should look at an external drive or a home server.

buzzy

217 posts

Master Geek

# 261718 6-Oct-2009 15:05

What Mario said.

RAID isn't data protection, it's fault tolerance. You've still only got one copy of your data, and if you had a virus, file system corruption, or similar, then RAID won't help.

The cheapest, easiest way to protect your data is to buy a USB hard drive and back up to that. Microsoft's free "SyncToy" utility is very good at keeping backups up to date.

hmpws

19 posts

Geek

# 261731 6-Oct-2009 15:36

Hm... maybe I worded it wrong, I guess I am looking more for fault tolerance.. otherwise backing up my files would take up a lot of space (using synctoy at the moment already for backing up important files).

Is there a good way of setting up RAID, probably using software since perfomance is not the most important aspect for me?

1gkar

722 posts

Ultimate Geek

# 261802 6-Oct-2009 18:44

Another possibility that is more backup, than fault tolerance is an external HDD used to house image partition backups, eg. Ghost images.

If you are building an HTPC, then using image partition software is a crucial piece of the package. One issue with no image backup, and you will understand why it is: can save possibly hours of rework.

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hmpws

19 posts

Geek

# 261806 6-Oct-2009 18:58

I have also used Ghost before :), the only problem I have had with it was if I resize a partition or something, it screwed up... but maybe that was just me so I haven't used it since then. Any soultion to that? To be honest, I haven't found a good guide to Ghost (14) and have been just trying things myself.

But yeah, thanks for the advices, I have used both Ghost and Synctoy for backing up and they work fine for the purpose.

Ragnor

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# 261808 6-Oct-2009 19:02

How much space are you planning to have?

It's viable to run RAID 5 or even RAID 10 in a HTPC because hard drives are so cheap now. 1TB drives are around ~$115 each and 1.5TB are around ~$175 each. Most motherboards have a good enough onboard raid controller that will do the job, it's not that difficult to setup you can usually follow the motherboard manual.

You might want to consider a separate NAS box or Windows Home Server for storage, these have fault tolerance in that they replicate files across mutliple disks and you don't have to worry about RAID setup/config. It's alot easier to add more drives over time. Your HTPC would just read over your network for content, would be fine with 100Mbit wired network.

Also as a few people have already mentioned any content you want to keep forever should be backup up to the cloud or offsite, in case of disaster eg: your house burns down.

1gkar

722 posts

Ultimate Geek

# 261810 6-Oct-2009 19:06

hmpws: I have also used Ghost before :), the only problem I have had with it was if I resize a partition or something, it screwed up... but maybe that was just me so I haven't used it since then. Any soultion to that? To be honest, I haven't found a good guide to Ghost (14) and have been just trying things myself.

But yeah, thanks for the advices, I have used both Ghost and Synctoy for backing up and they work fine for the purpose.

Never had an issue with that. Can even restore to new HDD. As long as the hardware sig is same, then I have been able to restore. Best Ghost site I've come across is here. I still use Ghost 2003.