How to back up data?

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jamesrb

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 29, 2004
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I am running Windows 7 and have a 2TB drive of data. This data is on a drive used only for storage. How would you recommend to backup this data?

My first instinct was to get a second 2TB drive, run both drives as a mirrored set using dynamic disks. I see people say that RAID is not a backup, so what is a better alternative?

I thought about hooking up the second 2TB externally and just manually copy the entire contents a couple of times a month. This leads to the problem where I would have to delete the contents of the backup drive to start the new backup. This seems worse than the mirrored disks. Please advise.
 
I typically don't recomend a service with an MRC (Monthly Recurring Expense) or where I haven't figured out how they will stay in business.

Going to break those rules-> http://www.backblaze.com/

If you guys remember, there was a build either on Slashdot or [H] detailing how they built their boxes.

Unlimited storage (per machine) for 5 bucks a month. What I'm working thru is batch files that consolodates everything companywide over the network on one machine, and that gets backed up.
 
Most individuals do not produce 2TB of data in a reasonable amount of time.

Using XCOPY or PKZIP with the proper switches can maintain a backup. I use both.
 
My first instinct was to get a second 2TB drive, run both drives as a mirrored set using dynamic disks. I see people say that RAID is not a backup, so what is a better alternative?
Click to expand...

The 2TB disk is fine but instead of a mirror use backup software that will store more than 1 copy of your valuable data. I can not recommend windows 7 backup software because it has been many years since I have use a windows based backup. At work I use a linux based network backup program that will make backups of linux, windows, macintosh (if we had any of those).
 
How can one 2TB drive store more than one copy of 2TB worth of data?
 
Compression and you will most likely not have 2TB of data you want to backup. I mean you exclude folders that you would never want to backup / only select the important folders.
 
But I do want to back up the entire drive. It is not full now but it will be full sooner rather than later.
 
Buy an external 2TB drive and do an incremental backup. It only copies what data has changed since the last backup. I use Comodo Backup to do this on my thumb drives. I backup my personal and work thumb drives to my server once a week.
 
I use RoboCopy (free utility from Microsoft) and do a file by file image of the data on my server to both an external USB attached drive and to a dedicated data backup server on my network. Works wonderfully.

RoboCopy is like XCopy on steriods. It's a command line program, has all kinds of options / switches. You can configure it to only copy those files that have changed and to make a mirror copy of any set of folders - or to do a cumulative copy.
 
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