At home we have the typical home network: cable modem into a router/hub/wireless dude (DLink was on sale that day). Beaming out signal to 2, sometimes 4 machines in the house. I also have hard cabled into the DLink a "server" which is really just my old PII running headless. I can get to it via VNC or Drive Sharing, typical stuff really. Our primary machine is where we save all our digital pictures (we committed to being film free over a year ago after dabbling in it for years). Other than that, the machine mostly has junk that I've accumulated over the years (you wanna see my source code from an assembler project on the Apple II from 1988? I've got it...). So my big losses data-wise would be the pictures and some of the historical stuff, but mostly pictures. The biggest pain is reloading the OS and all the other crud like apps and service packs.
So I've been thinking alot about back up. I used to work for Exabyte and our CEO's catch phrase was "there are two kinds of computer users, those who've lost data and those who will." Luckily, I'm one of the latter. I've looked at DVD R's (too small really), tape backup (too expensive, man oh man). So I've settled on throwing a couple of bigger drives in my "server", have a scheduled task on the desktop machine copy My Documents down to the server in the middle of the night, every night. Then at another equally optimum time, I'm going to have the server copy that drive to a twin drive, so I'll have 3 redundant copies of data. The largest workstation drive I have is 80GB and I just picked up 2 Seagate 160GB drives (for $50 a piece after rebates!), so I should have plenty of space.
But I haven't gotten things up and running because the old PII is a little desktop model and doesn't have internal space for two new 'Cuda's. So I've ordered a couple of USB 2 extenal enclosures (and a USB 2 card) and we're going to give USB 2.0 a spin. I have a little 10GB USB drive, only USB 1.1, that I carry around in my work stuff and it works fine, maybe a little slow but whatever.
Still working on the OS back up. I've got a copy of Norton Ghost that I'm going to give a try. Back in the old days we used to Ghost our OS's to a network machine. Then when our software would slaughter the OS (and it would regularly...), we could be up and running relatively fast. But we'll see...
So I've been thinking alot about back up. I used to work for Exabyte and our CEO's catch phrase was "there are two kinds of computer users, those who've lost data and those who will." Luckily, I'm one of the latter. I've looked at DVD R's (too small really), tape backup (too expensive, man oh man). So I've settled on throwing a couple of bigger drives in my "server", have a scheduled task on the desktop machine copy My Documents down to the server in the middle of the night, every night. Then at another equally optimum time, I'm going to have the server copy that drive to a twin drive, so I'll have 3 redundant copies of data. The largest workstation drive I have is 80GB and I just picked up 2 Seagate 160GB drives (for $50 a piece after rebates!), so I should have plenty of space.
But I haven't gotten things up and running because the old PII is a little desktop model and doesn't have internal space for two new 'Cuda's. So I've ordered a couple of USB 2 extenal enclosures (and a USB 2 card) and we're going to give USB 2.0 a spin. I have a little 10GB USB drive, only USB 1.1, that I carry around in my work stuff and it works fine, maybe a little slow but whatever.
Still working on the OS back up. I've got a copy of Norton Ghost that I'm going to give a try. Back in the old days we used to Ghost our OS's to a network machine. Then when our software would slaughter the OS (and it would regularly...), we could be up and running relatively fast. But we'll see...