get internal hardrive for backup?

[believo]

I'm thinking about putting a 250gb hardrive in my powermac g5 for backup purposes. Is this is a good idea? Is it likely that two hard drives would fail at once? Would I be better off w/ an external?

 

[Hemingray]

I'm thinking about putting a 250gb hardrive in my powermac g5 for backup purposes. Is this is a good idea? Is it likely that two hard drives would fail at once? Would I be better off w/ an external?

That's what I did originally, although I've heard from some that a secondary internal drive is technically not a true "backup" medium, that the backup must be physically set apart from the computer. But that's just getting into semantics. (Not Symantec. 😛 )

I ended up taking my "backup" hard drive out of my PM G4 when I got my iBook, and stuck it in an external case. Now I use that as a true backup for my iBook using SuperDuper, and it works great. I only plug it in when I'm backing up. Otherwise, it's always set apart and turned off. I think that's the safest you can get, other than an off-site backup.

 

[bankshot]

That's what I did originally, although I've heard from some that a secondary internal drive is technically not a true "backup" medium, that the backup must be physically set apart from the computer. But that's just getting into semantics. (Not Symantec. 😛 )

Not to get into semantics, but... 😉

For backup purposes, there's really no difference between and internal drive and an external drive that's always connected. The reason some people might recommend an external drive is so that you can copy stuff to it and then move it somewhere far away.

There are basically two main goals when performing backups (not to be confused with archiving data):

1. Protect against hard drive failure. In this case, an internal drive will do just fine. If your main drive fails, you just replace it and restore all your data off the second drive, which would be unaffected by the failure. This is especially useful if you want to avoid losing everything you've done in the last day/week/month/whatever.
   
   
2. Protect against fire, theft, flood, exploding power supply, or other catastrophic conditions that may affect anything within a certain radius of the computer. In this case, an external drive that sits in the same room or building is effectively the same as an internal drive. The fire's gonna get them both. Instead, you want to send your backups far away. Far, far away if possible. Ideally, you make your backup (encrypted if that's desirable) and send it to a friend or relative who's reliable and lives across the country somewhere. This tends to be more expensive and more involved, so you probably only do it every once in a long while (unless you're a megacorporation, in which case you make your daily backups and immediately ship them offsite).