For my needs, backup systems have either been too slow or too small. The reason for the problem? Hard drives get bigger at rate faster than any the back-up media I've tried over the years:
* Cheap but too slow: 1.44MB floppy diskettes, and 100MB parallel-port ZIP drives.
* Fast but too small: SCSI-based 2GB JAZ cartidges, and Firewire-based 4.7GB DVD-R discs.
The solution is to use a technology whose capacity increases as quickly as does hard disk space -- external hard drives. Last month I got Maxtor's 160GB external hard drive (US$270 at the time). It's big, fast, and cheap: 1.4x the capacity of my computer's total hard disk space; connects via Firewire 400 (what I used) or USB 2 (potentially 20% faster than Firewire).
I do two forms of backup:
1. Automatic backup of all non-program files every night at 1am.
2. Manual daily backups, where I drag my book files to folders called Monday, Tuesday, etc.
A third backup is off-site: my most important files (email addresses, etc) are PkZip'ed and FTP'ed to a secret location on the Web. I use Briefcase to keep track of which files need updating.
So far, it's working well, though the drive is already 70% full: 35GB of my LP records in MP3 format; 12GB of my digital photos; and 64GB of backup files. (There's now a 300GB model available from Maxtor, and I can theoretically daisy-chain 62 of these together, for a total of 18TB).
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