Another vote for off-site backup!

[ChrisPerry]

Gb is nice...but if you neet Tb then it's another issue.

I'm looking into hot swappable drives this year, keeping them at my bank, rotating weekly.

What I really need is good backup software! I've been using Cobian - not bad, especially for free, but it's not dealing with the quantity of files I have.

[jlipkin]

Retrospect is very good.

[Aaron Winters]

No kidding Chris, I have been thinking that as well as far as space requirements. 10MP RAW files add up quick. I gave up on backup software a long time ago. To much pain in the rear to have to use it to restore files. I use Syncback SE for backups so I have an exact duplicate of my file structure etc on my backup. You don't get any compression that way but you don't have to have the software installed to work with the backup archive. I guess other backup software will let you make a 1to1 copy but Syncback does it very well and is inexpensive.

[MathewLodge]

Originally Posted by ChrisPerry

Gb is nice...but if you neet Tb then it's another issue.

I'm looking into hot swappable drives this year, keeping them at my bank, rotating weekly.

What I really need is good backup software! I've been using Cobian - not bad, especially for free, but it's not dealing with the quantity of files I have.

Well, it is possible to blend hard drives with offsite online backup. PhotoShelter offers this option. You send them a HD with the files on, and they load it onto their servers. When you want a file it's right there online for retrieval. If you want a lot of files, they will burn them to a DVD or ship you a hard drive. IMHO, though, PhotoShelter is expensive for what it offers.

If you look at the folks with petabytes of data -- e.g. banks -- then they do disk->disk->tape. So the files are backed up first to disks for ease of access. Then, since frequency of retrieval falls off with time, they back up to good old magnetic tape (still the cheapest cost per bit), barcode label them and (typically) use a 3rd party such as Iron Mountain to store them offsite and maintain a tape inventory. Tapes get rotated over time.

For backup software that is any good, you need to start paying real money. On PCs, Symantec Backup Exec is the market leader... even Microsoft uses it. It can do continuous backups so there's never a backup window. MSRP is around $800 for the Windows Server edition but it is often available for less, and at the moment you can get 40% off if switching from other backup software. Backup Exec System Recovery is very good too, but more limited (e.g. no continuous backup) but also much cheaper.