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Saturday, September 18, 2010

The backup plan

When I was in Sri Lanka, I backed up the important stuff to DVDs. But it was not a great solution because eventually the DVDs stopped working. So much for a backup! Hard drives are much safer than DVDs. So I bought a new hard drive for backup; backup only nothing else.

Yes, I know that it is not the best backup strategy. What if I lose that hard drive. It is not something that won't happen. Actually, it happens more often than you think. But lucky me, it has never happened to me. I love my Samsung drives. They have never failed me. 

So I went to amazon and bought a new 2TB Samsung F4 Eco Drive. Yes it is 5400RPM, but that’s all you need for a data drive. I still use the F1 drive for everything. This new drive is just for backup, which means the data in the F1 drive are duplicated on the F4 drive. If I lose either drive, I won’t lose my data. But there is still no off-site backup. 

The drive cost me only JPY8980. Pretty cheap. There was a WD drive for around JPY8740 but I went ahead with the Sammy because it seemed to be somewhat faster and because I love Sammies. One problem I had was that I had to use the SATA data cable which was connecting the DVDRW drive because I didn’t have any spare SATA cables. I ordered a couple of SATA cables online through Ebay. (It is not a big issue because I hardly use the DVDRW drive. I use it for OS installation only. Everything else is on the HDD(s) or on the internet.

Today I looked at the same Samsung drive on Amazon, and the price had gone up to JPY9800. Lucky me! Samsung HD204UI

2 comments:

  1. Good plan. Is it on RAID?
    What if an EMP strikes ? lol.

    ReplyDelete
  2. How can it be on RAID? I only have one drive. I need another 1TB drive so that I can RAID the existing the 1TB drive for some speed boost. Like I said in FB, random accessing a HD video file sucks big time on a single drive. But what I don't know is whether RAID will improve it at all. Access speed doesn't improve with RAIDing.

    If an EMP strikes, I would lose much more than *some* data.

    ReplyDelete

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