The move to a fully digital life

[Mac]

It's usually around this time of year that I start bitching about how hard it is to keep backups of your information that you hold - mainly driven by year end processing.

I've this year decided to completely dump physical backup media - I.e. DVDs, tape etc. I'm used to having digital media scattered in different places. The problem is the amount of data you're dealing with now is just getting unwieldly isn't it?

I ended up splitting my data to :

1. Must have. Very problematic if lost - financial information, insurance and the like.

2. My personal digital life. Photos/videos etc. Absolutely gutting if lost.

3. Media (i.e. Music, Video etc.). Not irreplacable but expensive/painful to replace.

4. Reproducable stuff. VMWare servers etc. Software storage etc.

5. Don't care.

I've ended up with live online backups (as in remote storage - Mozy) for 1 & 2, supplemented with local backups (disk to disk). Also, disk to disk backups for 3, 4 & 5 simply because of quanity.

Just sorting out my data has made me realise the sheer size of the stuff we shove about nowdays Back when I first started in IT doing field support for Netware 2 & 3 your typical drives were no bigger then 100/200Mb. Doing server recoveries would take an absolute age over 10Mb Ethernet (or Arcnet - remember that?). Now you shunt about 1000 times that just on your own home systems. My own home storage now is in excess of 3TB, but to be fair I do run my own business from home.

It does make you wonder where we'll be in 5 years time. Home storage must be set to be a boom industry given the way we're all moving to a digital lifestyle.

Edited October 26, 2008 by Mac

[sitas3]

indeed. I've just invested in a Netgear readynas which will hold 2 x 1 terrabyte drives - mostly to feed my ever growing media (HD films/music) to my home network and HD media streamer.

My employer just introduced an online backup policy for our laptops via Mozy which is plain painful!

[Mac]

I found the initial seeding with Mozy a bit painful - even when I tried it over an uncontested 100Mbs link I still was getting more than about 3Gb/Hour. Eventually I just learned to ignore it and let it get one with it.

Initial seeding of about 150Gb took about 6 weeks to complete from my home system - I just made sure I had other off site backups until the seeding was done.

It does make you realise that ADSL is lacking behind the current demands for bandwidth doesn't it? Hell I get about 10Mbps out of mine and it still pisses me off :D

Mind you, it's not usually the download it's the upload isn't it?

[sitas3]

I've set mozy to do the minimum I can get away with - the rest is backed up to a USB drive currently. I'm not at home often enough to do a full backup via tinernet!

I've just had an upgrade to a lowly 4.5mbps (ADSL2) which is double what I've been using for the previous 2 years. FEck to think I payed a lot more for ISDN not that long ago really.

How many of us have still got a 56k modem gathering dust in their attic?

[Mac]

A couple of my sites I can still only connect to over modem My daughter thinks it's proper funny and runs round the front room saying 'f'bong, f'bong'.

[CarMad]

I do similar but use Carbonite, I get 1.3meg upload so its pretty quick on the whole. Nice that the bigger it gets my costs don't change.

I replicate all my data down to my homeserver and it sends if off site, works quite well for me.