And an external hard drive is easily trashed if it is bumped while in use. Don't ask me how I know.
Recordable DVDs take too much user intervention unless the amount of stuff to be backed up is trivial.
I use a Dell (relabeled Sony) 8-tape DDS4 autoloader, bought on eBay for a song. A full backup of every machine on the LAN runs in the early hours of each Sunday morning (typically takes 4 or 5 tapes) and a differential backup of every machine during the early hours of Monday through Saturday (one tape each day). Each tape holds 20GB without data compression; the last lot cost me $3.50 each; I can drop them with reasonable impunity, mail them across country, and store a duplicate set in the safe deposit box at the bank every now and again.
73
Alan NV8A
Dave AA6YQ wrote:
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An on-site external hard drive does not provide protection against
catastrophic damage from fire, wind, flood, earthquake or volcano; your PC
and the external hard drive could both be rendered useless. Burning your
data onto DVDs and placing them in your bank's safety deposit box would
provide more protection, but doing this frequently and religiously demands
discipline.
Yes, there is a privacy consideration with respect to online backup
services. One should only engage with a reputable company, and only after
reviewing their security policies. Both SOS Online Backup and Mozy encrypt
the data as part of the upload process. For me, that's good enough for log
data, photographs, and the DXLab source code. For financial and other
private documents, I have long used PGP to encrypt them for storage on my
laptop; only these encrypted versions are backed up online.
