I'd appreciate some input into my backup policy. At the moment everything that I want to retain gets burnt to DVD-R, with the most important stuff getting multiple copies and distributed to family.

However, I've noticed that hard drive prices are now getting back down to a reasonable price, and price per Gb for a 2Tb drive is now cheaper than the equivalent storage on decent DVD-R's. Is it worth me switching to hard drives for backup or better staying with DVD-R?

Either way I'd still do the important stuff to disc, as the volume of data and the ability to make multiple copies is the winner here.

I'm no expert but I guess that it depends on ease of use and how important the data is.

I regularly back up my laptop onto an external hard drive. This is a lot easier than burning to discs and its useful for when I get a new laptop and want to put some of my old files back on that.

However, all its really doing is protecting me from loss of data in the event of a catastrophic failure of my laptop or if its stolen. If the house burns down then the backup drive burns down with the laptop. I've even moved the backup to a separate location when I know I'm going to be away for a while, plus I hide it so that a thief will not take it along with the laptop.

I guess that the ultimate is cloud storage. Everyone is used to their e-mails sitting in the ether somewhere so they don't get lost whatever happens to your house/laptop. If I have an important file, I e-mail it to myself.

My photo archive on here is also safe storage for my build pictures.

DVD-Rs break down after about a decade, so useless for long term backups.

HDDs can have their bearings go sticky and fail to work unless they're used reasonably regularly.

Both can become victims to phsyical assaults (scratches and drops, respectively)

Flash drives are a lot more resistant to physical abuse, so they're nice to keep around for local backups (i.e. protection against hardware failure)


Saying that ultimately, anything in your house will burn down with it, so you want an offsite backup option, which the internets is full of.


I'd go with at least 2 cloud based doohickeys (maybe dropbox, box, picasa, google drive) and flash/SSD gubbins for a local backup.

Having went through several generations of various backup devices these days we use disk cloning to hard drives in one of those USB docking stations using Clonezilla for major backups. In addition document and picture directories get copied to 2.5" HDs in external USB cases.

Best solution I've found (and use, to an extent) is a NAS box with two decent sized HDD's in it. I run 2 x 4TB HDD's but do have most of my DVD collection copied to them so I can stream around the house. I have partitioned one of the drives so that I can also use it for my work stuff, and the second drive is a backup of the other. I was considering going to SSD's, but they're still significantly expensive for that size, and don't think I'd get the saving back from them any time soon.

I'd go for a cloud solution personally. It covers the catastrophic risks (e.g. fire) and also the version history that they normally provide will cover you for damage through your own incompetence or malicious damage through virus etc. In my experience one of the most challenging backup-restore scenarios is when some form of loss occurs, but no one notices for three months.

I'm currently using acronis, with win 7

That is used to backup key files to the cloud, I got 500gb for 40quid for the year IIRC.

Also as this is a PC, it backs up key files from the c: ssd to a HDD within the machine, pretty much nonstop. (Windows has a built in tool for this)

Once in a while I turn on an old PC upstairs and take an acronic image of the c: over the network to it. (This will allow me to recover the whole c: if the ssd fails without having to reinstall) windows has a built in backup image feature.

I got the cloud bit for the offsite backup, to be used in case of major house disaster/theft.

Having 2hdds and cycling them round to the family could help.

It is always good to veryify your backup too. Is the system may think it has written it, but when you try to read it back.....

This is one feature I think the built in windows image tool lacks, though it is probably scriptable.

I can def confirm that burnt DVDs don't last the test of time...