Best way to archive files?

Alright folks, I have another question for all of ya.

I'm stuck with a couple ideas on how to archive important files I have. Currently I have an external hard drive, which seems to work well enough but some folders has strangely become corrupt, thus I cannot open, read, or delete the contents or the folder itself (folder registers as 0 bytes). I'm not sure how this happened, but this has now go me worried.

I am thinking that I could backup my files on 50 or so DVDs, which obviously would take a lot of time, but in the long run may reduce a lot of headaches if my files continue to become corrupt on my external hdd. Most of the files will not need to be altered, but those which will I was also thinking of picking up a 16GB flash drive to store these files on. The other option is to purchase a new external hard drive.

What do you all think? What would be the best idea in my situation? Any other options?

 

I back up my important data on hard drives. I have that data triplicated, though. I used to do DVD, but as you said, that takes a ton of time, and it is inconvenient. It seems like you have a lot of data too. I'd seriously stick with hard drives. With 1TB drives under $100, two or three really isn't that expensive.

Others might have better ideas, though. Maybe you'll want to consider something exotic like tape backups?

 

Thanks for the suggestion Commander Wolf. You're definitely right, I'm not sure if I want to commit that much time to backing up via DVD, plus I recall there being a storage life for DVD (10 years or so). That and the possibility for errors and corruption during writing.

I'm going to look into another set of external hard drives like you mentioned. Would you suggest building my own external drive? I'm was looking at this drive before, seems like a decent enough deal: http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4282677&CatId=136 (it's in CAD btw).

Thanks again

 

I suggest looking towards a syncing software as it'll get rid of your "corruption" issue.

E.G -toucan from portable apps
-microsoft's sync toy is also pretty good

 

I was actually thinking to use desktop hard drives, since the price per GB is about half that of laptop hard drives. Then again, I've been thinking of porting my backup to laptop hard drives as they're generally more durable than desktop hard drives.

If it were me, I'd buy bare drives and separate enclosures or even SATA to USB adapters, but this probably isn't the most convenient solution for many people. It's hard to say whether your aforementioned drive is a good deal; all I know is that I can get a 500GB bare notebook drive for < $100 USD.

 

You're right, desktop hard drives are much cheaper per GB, but the external hard drive I currently own is a 3.5" and is a bit heavy for carry around. Plus it requires an additional power supply - I'd be happy to trade a lower speed drive to get rid of that external AC adapter.

Thanks again for all the help. + rep for the time taken to respond.

And thanks to jackluo923 for the syncing suggestion, I'll look into syncing and see if it will would work for my situation.

 

You can get a WD my book world edition (2TB) for under $250. It supports nas, usb..etc. It's much cheaper than laptop HDD and you can access your data anywhere in your house where there's wifi or anywhere in the world. At home, you can enjoy fast transfer speed through usb/firewire/esata (i think).

If you hook it up as a nas/usb/firewire/esata hybrid, you get the best of everything. Portability and speed.

 

That is a myth. The support of DVD is not going to die either. It is safer to store data on DVD than hard drives, which can die faster than the rumored 10 year life of DVD.

The best way to store now is in a Blu Ray drive. Blu Ray burners support both CD and DVD plus using Blu Ray you are getting 4x as much storage on a single disc and 16x as much on a dual layered.

Hard drives are temporary storage, DVDs are for archiving.

 

DVDs aren't made for archiving. Home made DVD's lose informations very fast, after maybe three or four years you have to be lucky to read all data, it may be worse with Blu Ray discs, and it will be very expensive. You have to find and buy high quality discs, store them in a special place, ... And in the end they will still fail.

In my opinion the best way is to create a NAS consisting of two desktop hard drives, connected to the internet, placed somewhere save.
Then get another HDD which you use to do local backups.
So finally you'll have the files on your NAS, a local HDD and your computer. If your house gets destroyed by a fire or something else then you still have the NAS. Just make sure that you update your harddrives regularly with new hard drives. This way you should be on a much saver side than with a DVD.
Additionally you can use a cloud storage like LiveMesh to backup your most important files immediately.

 

http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc23/SC23_p8_DCAj.ppt

When you read it all the way to the end, you will see that a DvD will outlast us all.

 

i hope you read this, too.
Because all it says is: Some DVD's fail from the beginning on, most of them fail after a short time, only a few may live (define live: how many failures are allowed?) a few years.

1 out of 5 DVD-RW's was ok. And what is this one? No one knows. So maybe you use the faulty disc.

This test is not new. A lot of magazines publish such testings and give some DVD's specific ratings. Only a few selected discs are ok, but even they have failures after a few years.

Their conclusion was:

So use the hard disks and refresh the drives regularly.

 

Thanks for the tips everyone. I think I'm going to shy away from archiving via DVDs. I've been having some issues with my burner generating corrupt discs. I'm going to look into some 2.5" drives. Anyone have any suggestions for brands, enclosures, or external hard drive units they had good luck with? Please note, I have a 3.5" external, so just looking at 2.5" drives at the moment.

 

An optical drive is still a good way to back up files, file transfer can be an issue with external HDDs when you have a ton of files...

 

I think it would be the other way around. File transfer can be a major issue with optical drive when you have a ton of files.