How Do Your Backup Your Data?

[Michael]

So, how do you guys (and gals) backup your electronic data? Anything creative?

I mostly use external storage devices to backup business data and information to, but I am in the process of migrating to a better backup solution.

[Fragadelic]

I voted dedicated backup server but that is not completely the answer for me.

I back my important stuff up to the server and then every month or so I write that data to dvd-r's.

For my digital photos, I also have another hard drive that stores all the data and it is not in any PC at the moment. I put it in, backup the pictures and stuff and then pull it back out and put it in a safe place.

[joshuapurcell]

I use tar/gzip or tar/bzip and send the file to a NFS mount on a system with a RAID array. Before I started doing this (about two weeks ago), I used tapes and dump/restore. I got tired of dealing with the tapes though. I couldn't imagine not getting tired of any form of backup media for that matter (CDs/DVDs, whatever), but tapes seemed so out-of-date for some reason that I had to move to something better. I've decided the only time I want a hard copy of my backup is if it needs to move to another non-connected network or some other similar transfer. With RAID arrays (and the very little chance of anything happening happening to your data because of it), it seems like the best option if it's available.

[1c3d0g]

USB Keys for life! Although I don't have a lot of data compared to other people, what I *do* have is extremely important to me. Only my music, movies, games and their updates are on CD's/DVD's, everything else (personal documents, configuration files etc.) is tucked away safely on my USB Key.

[Fragger00]

I do a full system backup to CD or DVD about every two years. About once every two months I backup what is essentially the "My Documents" folder to DVD. Important files are usually also on an e-mail server somewhere or on a flash drive.