Topic: Looking for a reliable backup solution

[sparkey]

You really expect us to believe the national archive vs. a random, unqualified website that mostly exists to make money via referrals?

How about a Solaris box with a 20 drive library and 100 tape changer, written first to VTL  then Vaulted to physical tape and stored at Iron Mountain?  Don't forget to re-dupe the tapes on a yearly basis for longevity.  And, of course, a physically separate, flood/fire proof data center built on redundant electrical grids for DR and replication purposes.  Anyone who archives with less is a Flyers fan.

I am reasonably certain that my discs will last quite a while; I keep them stored in a climate controlled environment.  Have you ever taken apart a hard disk drive?  It is a thin, delicate platter.  I've been doing backup solutions for businesses for 10+ years....you can spend as much as you want backing up your data, but each medium has its own pluses and minuses.

[Scooter123]

All concerts and CDs are stored in a 4 drive SATA Array, each SATA is a 2tb WD Green Cavier Drive--very quiet very low heat.  The drives are RAIDed with RAID 0 (Striping)

Those are backed up once a week to an identical 4 drive SATA Array with FOLDER CLONE via RAID Controller Card and cord, probably an eSATA. 

Those are backed up once a month to a single 2tb SATA drive via USB

Those are backed up every other month to another single 2tb SATA drive via USB

Back Ups are performed by FOLDER CLONE, a $30 product which scans the source and target and compares them, and then only writes over what needs to be changed, e.g., deleting and copying only those files/folders to make the target an exact clone.  Back Ups take only a few minutes, if not much is changed.  Brilliant program, easy to use, very intuitive, and cheap.  It stores data in same format, e.g., flac or mp3, not in a compressed format.

[Brian Skalinder]

you can spend as much as you want backing up your data, but each medium has its own pluses and minuses.

Yes, exactly...hence the need for redundancy, regardless of medium.  Since you focused on the minuses of other media, and repeatedly neglected to mention the drawbacks of optical media, I simply wanted to make it very clear that optical media, too, is susceptible to failure and corruption.  Glad to see it seems we're in agreement.

[kindms]

I built a freenas box. 2 1TB drives. they are using ZFS as the file systems. ZFS has some very handy error checking and redundancy built in to the file system. I have both drives in a single pool. Basically it is mirroring on steroids (im simplifying this greatly) You can pool as many HDDs as you want or have separate pools etc. I used an old P4 mobo i had lying around that only has 2 sata ports. it can pool different flavors as well sata, IDE, eSata, etc

each write contains the data needed to recreate all the data in the pool. If 1 drive fails I simply replace the other and it rebuilds the pool. It doesn't prevent against both drives failing at the same time so that is the 1 big concern. I do have all the data on different HDDs and backed up to physical media.

it isn't the most robust but trying to find a solution that makes sense and doesn't break the bank there will always be compromise.