develop and implement a backup strategy for my computer

It ran for a couple weeks now, and everything is good. Even did a test restore. :)

I figured that spinning disk was my best option here, as there’s no real point to removable storage for my needs. So… to fix disk failure errors, I’ve got a SATA RAID 1 array setup.

To save from good old fashioned os errors and wipes and brainfarts, I setup Windows XP to backup incrementally to a larger 160 GB drive every week. In a couple weeks, I’ll know if the backups are running as planned.

Well, of course, this is something that putting off won’t help. My hard drive died this morning…

I wanted to do RAID 5, but I just don’t have the money for three hard drives at the moment, so I’ve picked up two Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB and am going to do RAID 1.

As well as regular CD backups, I’ve got two file servers on my LAN. One has Type-1 RAID, my important stuff is regularly backed up onto both.

A S/W backup would likely need to go to DVD because of size, while a CD copy capturing only those files that changed (the deltas) would be adequate for a weekly backup. However, someone said DVD backups are more unreliable than CD’s, and not to use them. I’d like to know if this is fact or just rumor. So far I’ve used freeware MicroBackup2005
Regards,
Life_IsGoode at yahoo dot com

I set up a really simple system using CarbonCopyCloner and cron. I made the initial backup then rsync (I believe) backs it up again every night at 3am (if my laptop is at home connected to the backup disk). I’m only backing up to one disk and its not in a different physical location, but I think for me, its sufficient. Its not like there’s any mission-critical data on my laptop.

I’m probably going to be doing a raid-5 system when I can afford the controller, and I want to be doing this stuff with rsync or an equivalent. The problem is, I’ve only seen rsync for windows included with cygwin. I really haven’t bene that impressed with it… maybe I’ll give it another look.