Archiving Data

[Noise]

Just wondering what everyone uses for archiving large chunks of data especially when its several years old ?

 

Thanks

 

N

[neil poppleton]

External Hard Drives are cheap and easy. We archive onto 3 seperate hard drives and leave one in the office and the other two off site in seperate locations, call me Mr Safety...

[STRAT]

we store ours on external hard drive, and DVD. DVD is laborious to back up to, but we find it bullet proof (touch wood)

[neil poppleton]

we store ours on external hard drive, and DVD. DVD is laborious to back up to, but we find it bullet proof (touch wood)

 

We backed up to DVD's 5 + years back , but had issues recovering files. Cylic redundancy errors.....I would personally avoid DVD, especially with capacity these days.

[Dave Buchhofer]

We backed up to DVD's 5 + years back , but had issues recovering files. Cylic redundancy errors.....I would personally avoid DVD, especially with capacity these days.

 

Quoted for truth~ we've got quite a few expensive coasters from the early years.

[BVI]

External Hard Drives for long term storage and a 1 terra portable drive for daily backups.

 

I use this tool: http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/ and Acronis (acronis.com) for the External Hard Drive backup and archiving onto the drives.

[Noise]

Thanks for your replies, we use a series of inhouse and offsite hard drives and the reason I ask is because we backed up to DVDs some years back and found it less than ideal which seems to be reflected here.

 

I was thinking about Bluray disks but I'm uncertain if this is a better solution than hard drives.

[Devin Johnston]

I'm using an online backup service (carbonite.com) to back up my most sensitive data, the up side is it's cheep ($50 a year) and that gives you unlimited backup space and it's done automatically. The down side it it's pretty slow, you can only upload about 2-3 GB per day so the initial backup can take weeks/months.

Hard drives and DVD's are going to fail eventually and unless you are using a redundant system that requires continuous updating you will loose data. Online backup services are probably the most reliable and cheep way to store data long term if you can live with the negatives.

[Noise]

We have decided to stick with External Hard Drives - thanks for your help.

[STRAT]

my last firm used tape storage. that something we might consider. very very fast and reliable.

[anejo]

as a former employee of emc I've been using Retrospect for the pass 5 years.

http://www.retrospect.com/

[hockley91]

I've backed up to CD and DVD since 2004 and have not had a single problem recovering data....yet. I always burn at the slowest rate so I don't have any data transfer issues.

 

I use WinRAR and it compresses directories very well in my opinion.

[Trick]

Nobody using Iomega REV ?

[Frosty]

I use Zip disks

[anejo]

Nobody using Iomega REV ?

 

I use iomega/istorage online backup for my offsite backups.

[Noise]

Online backup isn't an option as the file sizes are very large - unfortunately.