Backing up a hard drive

[lucasbuck]

Maybe this is a silly question, but I'm a paranoid. I've got a 3 TB drive for storage on my HTPC setup the way I want with my movies, old TV series, home movies, etc. I've did a lot of work with the fan art, etc. For that matter I also spent last summer setting up my Mame arcade cabinet the way I want. I'd like to back stuff up just in case and was wondering about a couple options, or seeing if anyone else had anything to throw out there.
1 - I had thought about just picking up a couple more drives, physically copying the contents over, wrap them back in the static bags and putting them on a shelf somewhere. But I didn't know how well data staying on an unconnected HD or what the lifespan was.
2 - I was looking at Carbonite backup, which says their $59 home service is completely unlimited. I can't imagine since they charge more for business backup of just 250 GB. But I was thinking there might be an online option.

Just throwing out ideas and appreciate any opinions.

[leroys1000]

Using an external drive and something like acronis true image is a good way to go.
Acronis compresses the image to save space.
If you want to use bare drives,you can get a hard drive dock and just put the drive
in and run your backup.
You don't have to use plastic bags.
They make hard drive storage cases to protect them.
Something like this.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid= ... &_from=R40
Longevity shouldn't be a problem as hard drives don't degrade like CD's or DVD's.

[epayson85]

I do 3 backups of my 8TB of dvd/BR rips
1. I use a flex raid to create a drive parity that backs up only once a month so its not a real time raid. Which is honestly better for what it is since the storage doesn't change often so this prevents speed issues you sometimes experience with real time raid.
2. I backup to internal hard drives that I keep stored in a fireproof safe. My computer case has a hot swap-able sata drive space on the top of the case which works great for backups.
3. I use Crashplan its the same price at $59.99 a year and it is unlimited. I have been using it since last fall and I am 80% backed up. Also great is being able to access the files any where. I was able to download a couple movies while I was in the airport and watch them on the plane.

[lucasbuck]

Thanks for both the replies. Questions for each:
1 - How well does Acronis compress video\media files? I didn't know how compressible they were.
2 - How much have you uploaded to Crashpan? They say unlimited but I can't imagine they let you offload several TB's of data.

On a side note, does Acronis make recovery images? I've been looking for a good program to make a image of my boot drive to where I could just replace the drive, load the image, and be back to normal in case of issues.

Thanks again!

[bobr31]

My 2 cents.....Take a look at Macrium Reflect. I was a Ghost user for 6 years until it failed to back up one too many times and also failed to recognize USB 3.0. Macrium has worked flawlessly for me for over a year. It has a very light system footprint, does incremental, disk images or both and is very configurable. Have restored my system disk twice without problem, once as part of a swap out of my C drive which was failing. I tried Acronis but it used too many system resources and reminded my too much of Ghost.

[epayson85]

I have uploaded over 6TB so far and it hasn't stopped me yet. Great upload speeds too! I have fios so the thing is flying! The only issue is the service that is doing the upload needs to keep track of every file going on there so it needs a lot of resources dedicated to it or else it will crash. They recommend 1 gig of ram per terabyte being uploaded. I can say when I started getting over 3Tb the thing started crashing on me. I went into an ini file gave it access to 5gig of ram (I have 16 on server) and its been running fine ever since. I may need to dedicate more but its been running fine. A great feature is the weekly report you get from crash plan so even if you dont check out the status often the email will let you know. I also told it to email me if it doesn't connect to my server in over 24 hours which is how I found out the software was crashing.

[lucasbuck]

Glad to hear Crashplan has good speeds, I was reading a lot of complaints about Carbonite throttling a lot. I'm assuming I wouldn't have to leave it running, I would just want to upload my drive, but I'm not worried about changes made to it because at this point I rarely do.

I'll look into Macrium Reflect. Thanks for the suggestion!

[lucasbuck]

Another dumb question. If I went with something like Crashsite, is it something like dropbox where I can upload specific folders, or does it have to be like a real time monitoring thing where it has to be linked up and constantly monitor? Hope that makes sense.