Laptop Backup Solution For Thailand

[tjo o tjim]

I thought I figured it out. I was overly optimistic.

I knew that laptops have short lives on the islands, so I wanted to be properly prepared.

I bought a fantastic LaCie dual-layer DVD burner that would be able to back up my iBook on 12 disks each month. It would be worth carrying the extra 2kg of stuff around. It isn't that easy...

I knew optical media doesn't last long, especially here. Even the expensive stuff has 30% data loss within a year! To make matters worse, there is a lot of "fake" high-end discs out there, which have problems in months.

I have 30GB of music, and 15-20 GB of photos, with more stuff every day. I need a solution that really works, but is travel-friendly and tolerant of the heat, humidity, dust, salt air, and everything else that Thailand throws at it.

I would just get several USB harddrives to do the job, but it is going to get bulky fast.

Does anybody out there have a solution that really works? Everything here has to really be fault-tolerant.

Thanks for any insight!

[Youbloodybeauty]

Something like this:

http://www.scorptec.com.au/index.php?prdid=16156

and this:

http://www.skycomp.com.au/product_info.php...7dae25fdf079ef3

and this:

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

Too easy!

Cheers YBB

Edit: In otherwords get a laptop 2.5" drive and enclosure to backup. They are small.

Edited February 1, 2006 by Youbloodybeauty

[Simmo]

Share all your data out to P2P networks .. network backups .

But seriously last poster is on the money, a 2.5 " with external enclosure is great for travel and fair value. Buy a few if you want redundacy and get software to do mirroring or RAID.

Hard drives do fail eventually (always at the worst possible moment of course).

[Tywais]

As the others said, a 2.5 with enclosure is quite compact. Get two of them and do periodic backups on one then later do full backups on the 2nd, then cycle again. Since you don't need to have them powered up all the time, only when you need to backup, your data should be quite safe. Couple of links within Thailand showing what you can get.

Enclosure: http://www.shop4thai.com/en/product/?pid=13411

Drive: http://www.shop4thai.com/en/product/?pid=11781

[autonomous_unit]

It's good to keep in mind the two reasons for backups: one to protect you from failing equipment, and the other to protect you from failing software or user error.

Recording "permanently" to removable media is the best protection against user or software error... every time you plugin in your "one true backup harddisk", you risk accidentally deleting an important one and only backup copy! But

it is pretty hard to click the wrong button and delete a write-once disk that is sitting over in the closet.

Like others, I'd say an external disk or RAID if you are getting fancy is the best protection against simple hardware failure, e.g. you can always go buy a replacement laptop and restore the disk contents. I've even seen people with serious "availability" issues who keep a spare laptop around w/ the mirrored content, so they can start using it while the first one is off being repaired. This is probably not the best solution for most more casual computer users who can tolerate a little unplanned downtime.

To protect against "whole house failure", you need offsite backups. This way you have a copy somewhere after a fire, flood, or burglar takes all your stuff at once. Offsite backups come in two flavors: network transfers to a remote server, which could be a second computer at a friend's location or even a rented FTP service in some commercial data center somewhere; or make copies to removable media and send the copy off to be stored elsewhere.

Given your comment about the "islands", I wonder if this last alternative might be best? Maybe periodically popping a DVD or CD-ROM into the post to a friend with a better storage facilities might be cost effective? They could either store the actual removable disks for you in a cool, dark, dry place, or just copy them onto a new format (harddisk or new clean DVDs) each month! This makes sense if you have too much data to upload over whatever Internet service you have between you. Having them actually read the media means that you know if it got mangled in transit, and you can try sending another.

[tjo o tjim]

To complicate the problem a little, I have a mac and a pc- the mac is much more important to me, but the PC is work.

If I just go for a USB drive, I picture myself ending up needing a handful of them (I actually see a higher rate of failure for this type of drive than the laptop drive due to thermal stress.

What would be perfect is a small soho raid nas box, but it couldn't be any bigger or heavier than my full-sized dvd burner.

Either way, do I need a real software program, or go for the shell script?

[JackFrost]

Your concern is the same as mine.

Here is what I do.

I use two solutions and have had to impliment them plenty of times so i know they work and are VERY easy to do.

First I make a clean image of my hard drive - in other words without all the crap and extras that gathers. My photographs and mp3's are stored on a 2.5"hd (because I am paranoid I also have a 3.5" hd backup).

The software I use is Acronis True image.

It is fast and I have NEVER had a failure (touch wood).

It can make boot cd's so you can boot into when you need to restore.

I have my 40g hd partitioned into two partitions 1 x 30g and 1 x 10g. I run an image and save it to the 10g partition.

I then copy this image to both backup hard disks and burn a dvd of the image.

Each day I run http://www.maxoutput.com/FileBack/ and copy any changed files to both the 10g partition and the 2.5" usb hd.

If I ever have a crash I can have the laptop up and running in well under an hour. Easy.

I have used so many backup systems that did not live up to my expectations over the years.

Hope this helps

Jack

[Firefoxx]

People don't think about it that much, but it actually works: MO or Magneto-optical disks

They're essentially archival, yet they can be written many times. They never caught on anywhere except Japan. So, a nice solution, but impractical, since the drives and media are a **** to find.

I think if you want quick-and-easy-and-portable, you could two USB 2.5" external HDDs (say, 80+gb each). They're very portable (combined, they're smaller than your burner) and fast enough. Whenever you want to backup, just do a backup to both drives. That way you have three copies, one on your computer, and one on each of the drives. There's enough space to do a backup of both your mac and PC, too. The drives are essentially notebook drives, and so are more rugged than desktop drives, and as reliable as the drive in your notebook.

As for software, there are plenty of solutions out there. Some do incremental, some do full, some do both. It's best to just to walk around Pantip (or related) and pick up a few discs, and try each to see which one suits you.

The biggest cause of failure for optical disks is inadequate care. Store them in folders or jewel cases, and they'll last quite a long time. If you want *quality* discs, get only the ones that say "made in Japan". With anything else, you might not be getting what you expected. Of course, "made in japan" is not popular with Thais, who want "cheapest there is", so very few stores actually sell them.