Never thought I'd ever ask, but what do people use for backing up large
drives, like the 1 or 2 terabyte drives or larger? Hope not a
"cloud/mainframe".
Just installed a 2T onto the router for media (music) & will be doing
a project to rip my CDs to the drive for access via DLNA. I'll be
starting with the CDs that were xferred from vinyl records & will be
listening mostly from the network capable AVR I got earlier this year.
Your backups are the CDs themselves. You don't get to rip them and then
sell off the CDs. Yes, all that work has to be redone, but that's what
CDs are for in the age of MP3s.
Get another drive, and use it to mirror the current one.
See how much space you actually fill, and what is absolutely important.
I'm still barely using the 160gig I got in 2005. Most of the space I've
used up is just partitions for new releases of Linux, which could be
deleted if I had the need for the space. I decided that drive was so big
that I wouldn't partition it from the start, I'd just carve out partitions
as I needed them. So when I got a camera, I allocated a partition for
that. When I started turning my CDs into MP3s, I allocated a partition
for that. By keeping reasonable size partitions, it makes it easier to
backup the Important Stuff. So as I scan manuals for things I've bought
(or downloaded the manuals), I keep them in a special partition, and the
idea was to back up that with a CD or more likely at this point a DVD.
But as large as the files seemed, it really amounts to too little to waste
a blank DVD on, so I bought some USB flash drives. Treat them mostly as
"write only", every so often save the newer additions to the flash drive.
It should be reasonable backup, and since i"m not constantly deleting,
I'll not end up writing to a particular spot too many times. I have one
partition for what might be considered particularly important personal
things, like passwords, and that gets another flash drive. If I actually
went through the photos I took and took out the junk, I'd probably start
saving the good ones to a usb flash drive. The point is that in keeping
photos separate from MP3s and separate from manuals and separate from text
I download, it makes each a manageable partition, and thus it can be
mostly mirrored to usb flash drives (or blank DVDs). If I had massively
large paritions of all kinds of things, it would be harder to do this. If
I had lots of video files, it would also be more difficult, due to the
size of the files.
One thing worth remembering is that some of the nagging if a drive goes
bad isn't so much that things are lost, but that you can't remember what
might be important. Keeping track makes sense.
Michael