Backup Solutions
 

This is a two part question.

I have about 523 GBytes to backup. (Most is pretty static, IE my Digital Camera Pictures for 2007 is around 21 GBtyes.)

I've looked into tape drives. I'd be talking around $1,000 to get a tape backup. Where 120 4.7G DVD's would only cost ~$56.97

Question Part #1:

Can any one recommend a good backup hardware solution which would cost lower than $200?

Question Part #2:

I figure I can write a command like:
tar -czf - /stage | split -b 4.4G - Backup_

However I don't have potential to store ~523 GBytes of split backup files.

Is there a way to pipe the split files directly to DVD using growisofs and prompt for a new disk inbetween?

Also for restoring, how would that work? How would I switch DVD's?

Using DVDs would be a nightmare. If you created one big tar and split it, you'd be in trouble if any of the discs went bad. If you tar'ed sets of files, you'd have to catalogue what images were on which disc. Either way, at some point you're going to end up wanting to hang yourself by your shoelaces.

I'd grab a 1TB USB or Firewire drive, and backup to that. Should set you back about $300 or so.

Dave

Here's a decent Western Digital USB drive for $120:

Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 2.0 500GB Hard drive

Since you are using gzip compression (the "z" option to tar), you will probably need only slightly more than 250 GB to backup your 523 GB. If you use the "j" option, you will use bzip2, which will take much longer but will compress even more. I recommend staying with the "z" option.

I used to use a 250 GB USB drive. Problem was when it got hot the USB could cut out and corrupt the entire drive. So the drive is now in the machine, and the enclosure... well let's just say... any one seen office space. :)


Thanks for the suggestion in anycase. I'll keep it in mind (maybe there's been improvements in USB Tech). One idea I've been toying with is to convert the 3x250 sata drives into a LVM set. Thus would need to put the 530 GB somewhere.

a proper backup solution for $200 is non existant. to store 0.5tb on tape you'd need LTO3 compressed, and pray the daya is compressable. switching tapes manually considering the sizes is less of a nightmare than DVDs, but still not nice at all, and tape libraries are very expensive.
so a usb/firewire drive is the way to go. I'd even say the ONLY way to go.

only other solution I can think of is to set up a cheap old p2/p3 machine with large hard drives and use it as NAS

Sounds like a bad enclosure. These 150 GB Maxtor USB drives I use never overheat, even under heavy load. I have seen some crappy USB enclosures when I browse the shelves at CompUSA, though.

Maybe not. If he's dealing with images, they're likely to be in JPEG format, which won't compress.

Dave

You would be correct if he was only trying to compress one file. However, there should be enough common data in many files to allow compression. He might have to tweak the compression parameters (e.g. use a very large buffer).

DVDs tend to loose the data over years.

jlinkels