Thoughts on External backup/storage for PC?

[Bill L.]

Hi All,

I'll be upgrading my PC soon, and while I'm at it I thought that I would get my (local) backup storage out of the dark ages. I'm going to have a PC with Windows Vista, that will have a USB, firewire, and eSATA connections. I'd like to get something like a 4-drive RAID 5 external box connected via the eSATA connection, so that I have redundancy and an external disk that is usable for editing files on the fly, rather than just backing up the main hard drive(s). However, I can't say that I'm all that technically savvy any more (I was a whiz at MS-DOS 2.0), so set up of the external box on a windows system has to be pretty easy.

I'm looking at a Drobo, which is only firewire 800/USB 2.0, but looks pretty idiot proof to install. Any suggestions for a RAID drive enclosure (preferably 4 bays) that is easy to set up in Vista? I have about 500 GB of photo files, and scanning 4x5s and cleaning up the files is such a pain that I certainly don't want to lose my files.

Thanks!
Bill

[Steve Gledhill]

See this recent post:
http://www.largeformatphotography.in...ighlight=drobo
The Drobo doesn't help with external off site backups which - if you're serious about data security which of course you are - means another external drive or dives in addition to the Drobo (or whatever you choose for your local data) for off site security.

[Oren Grad]

Beware - Vista doesn't support Firewire 800. I found out the hard way while setting up my new Vista system recently and moving an external drive from my old XP system to my new Vista system. Vista does support Firewire 400 so fortunately I haven't lost the use of the drive, but it's something to bear in mind as you plan a purchase of new equipment.

[David Karp]

Regarding Vista: For what it is worth, the accounting firm that my wife works for was evaluating Vista for adoption by the firm. My wife was one of the testers. It turned out that they had lots of problems, including compatibility problems with software, and possibly some hardware (I am not sure about the latter). In addition, even though the computers were sold with and supposedly optimized for Vista, they were plain slow to load, while running, and signing off. Eventually, they took all of the test machines, rubbed out the hard drives, installed XP, and said forget Vista.

I think it is still possible to use XP, or get machines with XP on them, if you want.

[Oren Grad]

Well, I was able to make the transition to Vista successfully overall, though I sweated for a while over the purchase decision. In particular, I was able to move all of my devices - printers, scanners, external drives - to the new machine without incident other than having to run one type of drive on Firewire 400 rather than 800, as mentioned.

The cost was that it probably took me a day of work to track down the necessary Vista drivers and software upgrades and install them to get everything functioning again.

Since then, everything's been working more or less OK. Vista isn't entirely bug free, but for me it hasn't been any worse than XP; probably on balance it's been a bit more stable. It was actually a catastrophic meltdown of an XP installation on my older machine that induced me to upgrade to new hardware as well a few months earlier than I had planned.

[Bill L.]

Thanks for the replies! I have a couple of terabyte USB hard disks for off site back up (I manage about once a month)- but I am notoriously lazy for backing up, which means that if I can automate the local backup (or, ideally have everything back up as I work on it), then I can protect myself against hard drive failures, etc.

I am not looking forward to getting the scanners and printers updated for Vista, but I'm to the point I need to do something major to update the storage, and at this point it is worth upgrading the hardware to a faster machine (and the only thing I can find among the manufacturers I know are Vista based machines). Its sad Vista doesn't support firewire 800 - the machine I'm looking at doesn't have it, but there goes the thought of adding a card. . .

Thanks!
Bill

[PenGun]

There is this as well:

http://www.printfile.com/index.asp?P...S&Category=180

They claim the CDs last 300 years.

[Darren Kruger]

They claim the CDs last 300 years.

yes, but how long will CD drives last? or a computer to connect to them to?

-Darren

[cdholden]

I'm still using a tape drive. Tapes are older technology and still functioning as expected.

[Bill L.]

I used to back up to DVDs - though for the most part I'm currently using magnetic media. I'm looking for a solution where either I can work directly from the external hard drive box, but that it has redundancy in case a drive fails (a RAID 5 box would be great if I can find an easy one to install software-wise with an eSATA connection), or if it is a slower drive, then I can at least do incremental backups every couple of days in an automated fashion (e.g. the Drobo). If I have to do it myself, and spend time writing to DVDs and such, I am very bad about forcing myself to do this.

Cheers!
Bill