It’s time to wrap up our last poll which received nearly 800 votes. It turns out that 48% of you like to use a mouse pad, 42% don’t use one, and 10% sometimes use one. I haven’t used a mouse pad in a long time, and I thought that they were starting to be phased out. It used to be that every time you purchased a new computer it would come with a mouse pad, but I haven’t seen that for awhile. At any rate it looks like most of you still find comfort (literally or figuratively) in using a mouse pad.
In our new poll we’re hoping to find out what you use to backup your most important files. Personally I have another computer setup to backup important files from a few other computers, and it pretty much acts as a server in many respects. But we’re wondering where you store your most precious files. The new poll is located on the right-side of the site, or you can vote right here if Flash is enabled:
External harddrive and I have essentially the same files across 2 computers at home.
When I saw that mouse pad poll I decided to try ditching it, and since then I haven’t gone back
Back in 2002 I bought 12 5.25″ external hard drives, 6 of them were backups of the other 6. Most of them were 200gb but a couple were 120 or 250′s.
I initially bought IBM HD’s but had 7 of them fail due to that fiasco so I switched over to Western Digital and out of 5 years only 2-3 failed and I don’t blame the drives for that. (These drives have been used constantly, bounced around in a back pack, carried back and forth on deployments, etc.
In 2007 I was finally about to buy new drives (I would have done so sooner but the price-performance ration wasn’t good enough) so I now have 6 External drives (3 a backup of the other 3) all 750GB Seagate’s (and I’ve had 3 fail in the last 3-4 months….)…..
I finally finished building my file server for home use (6 1TB Western Digital HD’s in a ZFS RAIDZ2 3.6TB free space) and am currently copying my external HD’s to the file server. When I’m done I plan to have my external drives as a backup of the server. I’m debating on keeping an extra set of backup drives at work but haven’t decided yet….
5.25″ enclosures not hard drives for my old enclosures, my new enclosures are 3.5″.
I back up with several programs.
Acronis True Image to make disk images, Carbonite for offsite backup, Mirra server for in house multi version backup, and SyncBack to both internal and external drives.
No option for remote backup services?
I’m backing up my most important files to an external harddisk, which I can easily take with me in case of fire. After each backup I also disconnect it to make sure lightning won’t fry both my live data and backup data at the same time. The most important data within the most important data
is also backed up to DVD twice (in case one partly fails in the future – I will still have another copy).
I agree that a remote backup option is missing. I’d like to look into that too, but it’s not very interesting for me yet since the upload speed I have is too slow.
Mozy Home for offsite backup. CD Rom for physical backup.
I mainly use USB Flash drive.
But for smaller files, i also use my Gmail account.
And i did backup my Gmail account with abother Gmail account.
My important files get put on multiple physical drives (one in the fileserver, one external), as well as off-site. Pictures for instance are on two internal drives in the fileserver, an external 500G drive, Fotki (full resolution original images) and Amazon S3.
If you’ve ever lived through a flood or tornado, you’ll know the importance of off-site (far off-site) backups.
I use Cobian Backup [cobian.se] to backup my most important files I could not do without to an external hard drive (it’s quite easy, I can just set it and forget it other than an occasional check). Once in a while (about once a month) I take these files and burn them to DVD which I keep off site; I hope to upgrade to a BlueRay burner for this task in the near future. Online backups can be useful at times and have saved me in the past. The biggest issue for me is my upload pipes are much smaller than my download pipes (with Comcast) so it can take quite some time to do an anline backup.
Vital data goes to an encrypted 4gb usb-stick updated on a daily (hourly) basis, everything else is also mirrored on an scsi drive. In addition I do daily incremential backups to an external sata-drive and a weekly backup on RW-DVDs. I do not trust online backup services at all.
Cheers
Geeze, that is a lot of fricken storage!
I would classify that under “another computer”
The discs for that are going to be crazy expensive for awhile though.
i either use [mozy.com] or if its really important and i need to transfer it ill put it on a flash drive.