backups

on my to do list for ages has been the job of getting properly sorted out to take regular backups. Anyone share any advice on the software used? backup device?

Is it worth taking Drive Images or do you just back up data?

Any comments at all on making sure regular safe backups are carried out would be great.

Current method is to burn recent work to a CD when I remember.....

Maybe a bit OTT but this is how I do it.

Win2k box at home running Highpoint Rocket Raid 404 controller with 4 x Maxor 30GB drives split into Raid 0+1.

This gives me a single disk of 60GB + a 60GB mirror disk. + twice as far read/write speed as the disks are stripped as well.

So I allways have a mirrored disk created on the fly. Anything falls over just press a button.

www.highpoint-tech.com

mmm Aqua do you have your lair in an extinct volcano? spose it's a little OTT lol

anyway I have used a program called careful backup before which was excellent, it's got a 30 day free trial and then it's about $35 but it is good, you can create different groups of files to backup etc... you just set the files you want to back up, where you want them stored and then save it, when you open the program up you just dbleclick on your group and it's away on it's own..done !

I am using "backup Now! v 3" which is ok but doesnt seem as intuitive as the careful backup one..but it does the job well and compression is good too,

to be honest I make sure I upload all my sites images etc to the relevant site regularly even if I am not using them at present so should the worst happen I can Download the full site folder...with web images, png, photoshop files etc too rather than just finished uneditable jpeg/gifs.

you only get burned once with backups, it's a steep learning curve..!!

Having said im also backing up 3 production servers and customer stuff, so it is mission critical. Raid array setups are very cheap these days if you go with IDE drives. My Raid adapter cost about £100 and you could get 2 or 4 harddrives pretty cheap.

<img src="http://moomin.linktrader.co.uk/pc5.jpg" style="border:0;"/>

The four maxor drives use to get flookin' hot you could light a ciggy on em :smokin: so I had to mount the 120mm fan on the top .. which works a treat. Theres also another 3 harddrives behind the mass of blue cables at the bottom.. but then theres also another four fans out of sight at the bottom.

<img src="http://moomin.linktrader.co.uk/pc7.jpg" style="border:0;"/>

The raid card is where those blue ide cables are going into.
Underneath those fans (theres 9 fans) theres 2 Pentium 3 Katmai cpus working there arse off.

<img src="http://moomin.linktrader.co.uk/pc1.jpg" style="border:0;"/>

aquanuke - how noisy is your computer?! that's a whole lot of fans in there

Thanks for the comments, will get it sorted now. I'm sure I am putting myself at a higher threat of hard drive failure by just talking about it....

its very quiet .. All in all I fink theres over 15 fans and theres 4 of the 120mm ones. If you look through overclockers.co.uk they give out all the fan speeds, outputs and decibels. Also you can drop the speeds of the fans with little adjustable voltage thingies at the bottom of this page..

www.overclockers.co.uk/ac...es_34.html

To be honest I ended up having to put so many in cos' my boards layout was pretty naff.. ie the 2 cpu's are too close together and too near the powersupply.. the cpu heatsinks under the fans are touching each other... and Id already filled all my harddrive bays up with 3 hardrives , cdrw and dvd so I had to put the 4 h/d's right on top of each other.