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How do people back up their media drives?

C

cardsdoc

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Just lost my HD with all my ripped/converted DVD's, blu rays. I knowingly didn't have a back up drive as it was not mission critical data and I have original disks but it certainly will be a lot of time/work to get it all back. I'm thinking I should have a back up plan this time. What are people doing for this? A raid 1 set up? Just having a second disk that periodically gets cloned from main drive? Other options?

Also I was thinking of getting a 2 TB bus powered portable drive instead of desktop class for less space, heat, and easier to move around. Assuming 2 TB is enough, which for now it is, any reason not to do this over a desktop class external drive?

Thanks
 
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It's a StarTech dual dock, and I'm on a PC, where I use SyncBackSE's "mirror" function to do file-based backups at least once a week. I previously used an eSATA dock, but the USB3 dock is just as fast, and I really like its independent power buttons, plus my new machine doesn't have eSATA, so there's that. The backup for my main machine fits on two 2 TB drives, which I can plug in at the same time, power on, and then run the SyncBackSE profile to backup to both drives, and that's that - very convenient. I set up the profiles to split the data roughly equally across the two drives. For my secondary file server, I've found it useful to organize its essentially archival data into 1 TB folders, as I have several old 1 TB drives I use to back it up, and the 1 TB folder limit is obviously a nice multiple that will help when I replace these drives with 2 TB, 4TB, etc down the line. So, I'm not relying on any program to split my files across multiple drives; I'm doing that myself.
 
My media files are on a RAID-5 NAS, which was temporarily backing up to a second RAID-5 NAS whilst a CrashPlan backup was running. The latter's now completed after several months, so the second NAS is now shut down.

I've lost a couple of drives over the past couple of years, though resilience remained in both cases and I was able to just replace the failed drives, so RAID-5 was a good compromise for me between capacity and resilience. CrashPlan gives me the off-site backup at a price you can't argue with.
 
My media library is around 1.6TB and I back it up to an external HDD and CrashPlan online - it took about a month to do the initial backup (I've got reasonable internet speed of 12Mbps upload) but subsequent backups when I add stuff are obviously much faster
 
I currently use an external HD hooked up to my Airport Extreme, as well as Crashplan. However I purchased another external HD, and am going to cancel Crashplan, and just swap out my HDs, always storing one in a different location such as my office.
 
I've got a raid 1 box on my home network on which I store my important stuff, and most media I've digitized lives there.
 
I use a Mini for an iTunes server. Media is stored on a 3tb USB 3.0 Seagate desktop backup plus drive that plugs into little dock, cost was about $100. I have two more identical drives that I rotate for backups, storing them in another part of the house. Late every night a CCC script runs to clone the media drive.

The internal drive on the Mini really doesn't have anything on it but the basic Mac software plus a couple little programs like Handbrake and IDentify. It is continuously backed up to an AirPort Time Capsule.
 
Internal 4TB with External 4TB that syncs every night. Also do a monthly backup to a 2nd External 4TB that I keep off site at my office.
 
For those that are using a bare drive dock setup instead of regular enclosed external drives what do you see as the main advantages?
 
Got a 2tb seagate usb powered hdd. Copied my entire itunes media folder to it. Then, every day I use synkron (free) to sync the folder. Also use time machine. Also keep another copy on a desktop hdd at home.
 
It is not the best but it works. I have an external USB harddrive connected to my NAS box that has program running on it that sends all my data to the external harddrive.

Since my Mac has it's time machine sent to the NAS box, I basically have two backups of TM, since it too is copied over to the external drive.
 
Thanks for everyones input. I waivered a lot on what approach to take from 2.5" bus powered drives to dual bay raid 3.5" enclosures with 3TB drives, to a duel SATA USB dock. My collection is under 1TB at the moment. The seagate backup plus portable 2TB drives seemed like a nice easy inexpensive option so I bought 2. Its actually much cheaper to by the seagate enclosed unit (99$ each) than the bare drives + enclosures. My server is an old 2007 MBP and I do most encoding on my 2012 rMBP so having a portable drive to go back and forth is convenient. I will setup scheduled cloning or sync software to back up from one 2TB drive to the other. By the time I run out of space options and my setup will probably different anyway.
 
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Don't forget the one crucial part beyond those purchases. Store a backup away from the master (at work, at someone else's house, etc). 20 backup drives are no good if they all burn in the same fire or are lost in the same flood.
 
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