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what is the best, most cost-effective way to backup multiple hard drives?
October 28, 2005 5:34 AM   RSS feed for this thread Subscribe

I have three 160 gig hard drives full of Apple Lossless music that I've ripped from my CDs. I want to keep these drives backed up, obviously. Is the most cost effective route to just buy a 500 gig (or ideally, one TB) drive for this purpose? Are there enclosures that hold multiple hard drives that would be appropriate (and cost effective) for this use? With the deals out there, it seems cheaper to buy more 160s than a 500 gig. I'm on a Mac G5.
posted by thewiseacre to computers & internet (15 comments total)
I was about to ask an almost identical question, except that I have photographs and several years of quicken data that I want to store as securely as possible, along with music and other data. I am thinking about going with a RAID array-not cheap but given the importance of my data and the work thewiseacre must have put into his music collection security may be more important than price. Does anyone else think this is a reasonable solution and if so, any reccommendations as to manufacturers, models, etc.? I too am on a MAC.
posted by TedW at 5:55 AM on October 28, 2005


Just to avoid confusion, by "security" above I meant protection from loss of data, not protection from nosy people.
posted by TedW at 5:56 AM on October 28, 2005


Previous backup question.

The cheapest option would be an external 500Gb drive. If you're looking for an enclosure to hold multiple hard drives, the term you probably need is "NAS" - Network Attached Storage. There isn't much around for a modest budget, though.

If I were you, I'd build a cheap Linux-based box, stuff it full of 250Gb drives in a RAID array and keep it in a cupboard somewhere. The hardware (excluding drives) shouldn't cost more than $300.

TedW: if your Quicken data isn't very large, consider Strongspace - offsite secure backups for about $2 /month /gig.
posted by blag at 6:23 AM on October 28, 2005


I've never delved into Linux before, and while I am quite technically inclined, I don't dare devote the time to the learning curve for that. I've always assumed that I need to just bite the bullet and buy a 500 gig drive, but I've been waiting the past nine months for a serious price drop before doing so. I'm hoping holiday specials will drive the price into the $200 range but that's probably wishful thinking.
posted by thewiseacre at 6:32 AM on October 28, 2005


Strongspace would probably be fine for my Quicken data, but my rapidly growing pile of photos of my 8 month od daughter are also somewhat irreplaceable and are soon going to break the 100 gig barrier, not to mention a variety of other things I want to keep around. My budget can be quite a bit higher than thewiseacre, so I am willing to pay for redundancy.
posted by TedW at 6:57 AM on October 28, 2005


I'd toss a RAID card into some cheap box too then disk up 3-400 GB drives for a cool 1TB of storage. You don't need to use Linux though if your more comfortable with MacOS or Windows.

Much safer than single external disk.
posted by Mitheral at 7:25 AM on October 28, 2005


The NSLU2 is the cheapest type of NAS available - you just plug external USB drives into it. From memory it will also backup one external drive to another which should cover your redundancy requirements. It cost about $80 last time I looked.

Here are a couple of additional threads which may help: (1) (2)

The cheapest and simplest option will still be a big external drive. It can be even cheaper if you make your own with an IDE disc and a standalone enclosure (about $20)
posted by blag at 7:42 AM on October 28, 2005


Backing up important data is a good idea, but it is only part of the solution. As an IT professional, let me give you some thoughts about data security for individuals, that I wish were followed by more people, so that I and my colleagues have to answer fewer urgent questions from the anxious faces of family and friends, which all too often have us starting out, "I'm really sorry, but..."

A good backup strategy consists of:
thewiseacre has done a) in the above list, and is looking for advice about b), which, to some extent, will be influenced by choices for c, d, e, and f. But let's start with the hardware part of b), which is the focus of the original question.

Hard drives are an increasingly popular backup option, because of the their speed, convenience, capacity, declining cost, broad compatibility and relative durability. In USB external form factors, they can also provide portability, which is important for accomplishing item f, above. There is a lot to be said for external hard drives as a good choice for a personal backup hardware solution, and little to be said against them. I have been using inexpensive IDE hard drives as a key part of my own personal backup solution for a couple of years. Let me describe what I do, and why, to give you some ideas you may adapt to your situation as needed.

In my personal computing life, I have several machines. My "main" box is a WindowsXP machine, whose main storage is built on enterprise class SCSI disks. No RAID, since these are fast, high quality disks, with sufficient throughput for my needs, and very good reliability. In this machine, I also have a couple of inexpensive 160 GB IDE drives, which are the primary backup targets. I also have a WindowsXP laptop, and a few small servers (Linux and FreeBSD), and one of these servers is also equipped with a 160 GB IDE drive, which serves as the target for network backups.

I keep no primary data on the laptop, except in a folder which is easily replicated to my main Windows machine via Groove Networks secure file sharing application. Laptops die, get stolen, or are otherwise something I've learned to treat as an expendable. So, I just make sure that any files I change on the laptop are copied back to the Groove shared space on my main machine, and that I have the restore disks and software installers for minimal stuff I have on the laptop, and a few times a year, I do Ghost the drive on the laptop to an external USB drive, just in case..:-) But if I lost the laptop tomorrow, I wouldn't be hurt a bit, except for the hassle of replacing it, and reinstalling and updating my application software.

My main machine and servers run twice a week full backups to their IDE backup target drives, using scripted backup applications. I run full backups simply because, in a pinch, they are the shortest way back to restoring my systems to any point from an appropriate backup. It takes more space on the backup drives, but I don't keep massive amounts of media files on my machines. If I did, it might make more sense to adopt an incremental or differential backup strategy, to conserve space on the backup drives, but for me, ease and speed of restore are more important.

On my main machine, I use Norton Ghost, running at 3 a.m. on Wednesdays and Sundays. On the *nix boxes, I run rsync scripts, running on a similar schedule. The backup scripts are preceded by some maintenance scripts, which on the Windows box (for example) do a full virus scan, deletion of temp files, and defragmentation in preparation of the drives for backup. The successful completion of the backup scripts sends me email messages to an external address which I normally check each day anyway. If I don't see successful messages, and I'm home, I immediately check the error logs on the backup, and correct the problems. The main backup drives in all the boxes are large enough to keep about 4 weeks worth of twice weekly backups on hand, and overwrite the earliest backup they have when they need to free storage for each new backup, as part of their backup scripts, so I automatically have several generations of backups on hand, in case something like a worm or root exploit creeps in to some later generation of backup, that I don't notice for a week or two.

The data on these boxes is stored in separate partitions, to facilitate backup and restore, among other things, and each box has a small 200 meg test partition, containing a few test files, which I can quickly wipe out and restore from backups, to regularly test my backup catalogs, software, and preparations. On Sunday afternoons, I do a weekly copy of the internal backup drives to USB external drives, and exchange the external USB drives with a second set of the same type drives which I keep at my father's house, about 30 minutes away. I used to use DVD-RWs to make these offsite backup copies, but when my backup set sizes got to requiring 3 or more DVDs (and an hour of my time a week to make offsite copies), and the price of USB external drives dropped enough, I started using USB externals as my offsite media.

All in all, this may sound like a lot of trouble and cost, but I'd look like an idiot to my friends and clients if they found out I had unrecoverable data losses in my personal computing life. So, it is worth the $ and setup time it cost me, and the 20 minutes of time I spend a week testing restores to my test partitions, swapping external drives and collecting and delivering external drives to my father's house. I could have saved some money by centralizing backup on a network attached storage machine, and I effectively do this a bit on the *nix clones, but in a pinch, under pressure of time, where something catastrophic has already occured, getting back to "normal" directly on the various boxes is worth something to me, so I've chosen strategies and solutions that facilitate this. Otherwise, except for replicating my offsite media weekly, my backup strategy is all automatic at this point, and I don't think much about data integrity or backup otherwise. At some point, when it makes sense to do so, I may put an offsite box at my dad's place, and do the offsite copies over the network, but I go there myself regularly, and so it is not a big deal to do the rotation as I've describe, for now.

And no affordable strategy is perfect protection. You have to balance cost, convenience and reliability in every scenario. As an example, I did have a backup drive die in my main Windows box last month. It was replaced under warranty, and I missed one mid-week backup cycle on that box in the time it took to have the spare shipped in and replace it. I don't keep a spare on hand, because this hasn't been a problem up to this point, but for another $80 I could.

At any rate, to return to the original question, if it were my money, and I was satisfied with a simple file system copy strategy, I'd probably go with a few external 160 GB USB drives, that I could regularly plug in, copy the data drives in Finder, and unplug to put up on shelf. For about $375 (and maybe less), you'd have a fairly convenient and simple primary backup solution. Keeping the drives unplugged when not backing up files would protect them from system level problems creeping in, and might extend their lives considerably. Splitting the backup across several drives gives you partial protection against the total loss of your backup due to failure of a single large capacity drive, and 160GB drives integrate pretty well with your current storage organization, in a simple copy style backup scheme. 160 GB drives are an older density too, and are kind of at a "sweet spot" price wise, as demand for larger capacities causes manufacturers to price them down to move them. You could also easily transport them offsite, if you want to add some physical redundancy to your backup strategy, by keeping your backups at your office, or a friend's house. But you wouldn't have any multi-generational redundancy, and you'd be responsible for keeping your backups current manually, and verifying their integrity, and testing restore capability. So if you really view this music collection and the hours that went into assembling it as very important, you might want to think about things like backup software, schedules, and testing to help automate the process, and keep you doing backups that are worth having.

But good on you for thinking ahead!
posted by paulsc at 8:32 AM on October 28, 2005 [1 favorite]


There are plenty of dual- and quad-bay Firewire enclosures. I paid $50 for a dual FireWire 800 enclosure about a year ago but I can't seem to find that model anymore. Here's a reasonably priced quad-bay FireWire enclosure; several Web stores seem to have the same model in black or white or beige. There are also ones with removable trays that let you install and remove drives without opening up the case but these tend to be a lot more expensive.

As for drives, 300 GB seems to be the sweet spot. I bought a 300 GB Seagate Barracuda from Fry's for $90 after rebate a couple weeks ago. It's one per customer but other stores have offered similar deals (e.g. TigerDirect has a 300 GB Maxtor for the same price after rebate). Look around, you'll find 'em.
posted by kindall at 8:36 AM on October 28, 2005


Here's a reasonably priced quad-bay FireWire enclosure

That is a nice enclosure, I have a few of the beige versions, along with some of the 2-bay 302F versions. Geeks often has this 4-bay enclosure in stock for $75 or so. A good deal.

One caveat is that I have been running different versions of these Taiwanese MaPower enclosures since 2001 or so. They have a huge failure rate, mainly in the power supply. If you do use them, run in RAID-1 config, and keep a spare enclosure or two handy for when the main one fails. Because it will...
posted by meehawl at 1:23 PM on October 28, 2005


What isn't being addressed here is how volatile the data on a hard drive is. What I mean by this is, if you put the media in a drawer for ten years, how many bits can you expect to become corrupt.

I am sure hard drives are less volatile than writable DVDs, but that isn't really saying much.
posted by Chuckles at 3:50 PM on October 28, 2005


Great answer, paulsc.

Chuckles: Presumably the volatility of your hard disks is not so much of a concern because you'll be upgrading them and moving the bits to new drives before the old ones start generating errors (i.e., no drawers). Plus, you can run error-detecting and -correcting software on them periodically, something you can't do with write-only media like DVDs.
posted by breath at 4:28 PM on October 28, 2005


I don't see why you would necessarily need one large drive. Buy the drives in whatever size is cheapest / most convenient. Then just copy files onto drive #1 until it's full, then move to drive #2, etc. If you want to get fancy do a JBOD RAID, but that's not necessary.

If you do go the RAID route I highly recommend doing it in software and NOT with hardware unless you get a REAL hardware RAID controller (which is not insignificant $$$.) The elcheapo "RAID" (fingerquotes) controllers on most consumer motherboards are just gobshite: They have little or no hardware acceleration (it's done in the driver), and they use some nonstandard proprietary striping format which makes recovery a huge pain in the ass. Just go software RAID all the way.

Relying on hard drives as long term backup / storage is probably not wise, though.
posted by Rhomboid at 8:20 PM on October 28, 2005


if you put the media in a drawer for ten years, how many bits can you expect to become corrupt.

This is usually expressed in no uncertain terms by the manufacturers. For example:

Seagate Personal Storage
Seagate Barracuda 7200
Nonrecoverable Read Errors per Bits Read
1 per 10^14

Seagate Enterprise Storage
Cheetah 15K
Nonrecoverable Read Errors per Bits Read
1 per 10^15

That is, there is an order of magnitude more of data unrecoverable data corruption in the personal series versus the enterprise series.

That's why I run Cheetah SCSIs RAID-1 for my server's main discs, and low-end ATA in RAID-5 for the media storage. Media data usually has extra redundancy built into its frames sequences so it is less critically sensititve to data dropout or mutation.
posted by meehawl at 10:36 AM on October 31, 2005


Is there a performance advantage using SCSI versus SATA? If so, how much?
posted by DeeJayK at 11:07 AM on November 9, 2005


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