Hi All,
I currently have about 5GB of important stuff (data, photos,etc) on our home computer. I have been using the Mozy backup service for a year or so now, and it seems to be working fine (although I'll really find out if I have to do a restore).
I'm about to transfer all of our digital videos to my computer for editing, as well as long term storage (I don't know what the lifespan of digital tapes is). I want to keep them in the dv-avi format on my computer, which as far as I can tell is the least compressed option and this will give me the most flexibility for editing and changing to different formats in the future. The problem is that this format requires about 200MB per minute, so my 20 one hour tapes converts to about 240GB. I expect this to increase as we film more stuff.
I only have about 40GB spare at the moment, so I'm looking at buying an external hard drive, probably with 500GB capacity (like a WD My Book). What I'm trying to work out is the best backup strategy for this amount of data. The two options I see are:
1. Use Mozy for the video files - as Mozy has a flat rate it won't cost me any more to do this, but the time required to upload all this to the Mozy server will be weeks if not months (fortunately my ISP does not charge for upload usage, I think). And if I ever have to do a restore it will take a similarly long time.
2. Spend some more money on the external hard drive and get one with RAID 1 capability. This mostly protects against hard drive failure, but doesn't protect against disaster like fire.
Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations on which way I should go, or any alternative suggestions? Thanks.
John.
I currently have about 5GB of important stuff (data, photos,etc) on our home computer. I have been using the Mozy backup service for a year or so now, and it seems to be working fine (although I'll really find out if I have to do a restore).
I'm about to transfer all of our digital videos to my computer for editing, as well as long term storage (I don't know what the lifespan of digital tapes is). I want to keep them in the dv-avi format on my computer, which as far as I can tell is the least compressed option and this will give me the most flexibility for editing and changing to different formats in the future. The problem is that this format requires about 200MB per minute, so my 20 one hour tapes converts to about 240GB. I expect this to increase as we film more stuff.
I only have about 40GB spare at the moment, so I'm looking at buying an external hard drive, probably with 500GB capacity (like a WD My Book). What I'm trying to work out is the best backup strategy for this amount of data. The two options I see are:
1. Use Mozy for the video files - as Mozy has a flat rate it won't cost me any more to do this, but the time required to upload all this to the Mozy server will be weeks if not months (fortunately my ISP does not charge for upload usage, I think). And if I ever have to do a restore it will take a similarly long time.
2. Spend some more money on the external hard drive and get one with RAID 1 capability. This mostly protects against hard drive failure, but doesn't protect against disaster like fire.
Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations on which way I should go, or any alternative suggestions? Thanks.
John.