Ideas for backing up data

[md]

So here I was downloading an ungodly amount of stuff, when suddenly my drive decides to fail (after only 125 days of use). Now I'm stuck with the problem of backing up 250GB of data while I get the drive replaced under warranty... anyone got any ideas how I might be able to manage this? Oh... and preferably for free... I don't particularly want to buy a dvd burner or a new drive (we... maybe a new drive...).

[Hikaru79]

Here's what I do in these situations. Get another storage facility (a friend's computer, for example). Bring it to your house and hook it up to the LAN, then boot the computer from a Live CD (I'm assuming your drive won't boot an OS). Mount the hard drive, then just FTP the files over to the network drive, then move it back onto your new drive when you recieve it.

[Paul]

How the heck does a HD fail in that short amount of time? How the heck do you have 250 GIGS fo data? Maybe those two are related o.O ...

Seriously, i've been using 2 20 gig hard drives for the past 3 years, and they've been fine

[MysticVegeta]

I am confused what do you mean by fail? How does it look? What happens when you boot your OS? Is it because you dled excess stuff that you HD can store?

[timmytheturtle]

Hikaru79 has the right idea. It's probably the best way to do it.
But maybe you don't have to back-up 250GB worth of data. Delete what you absolutly don't need. then that makes it easier. Cause who will give up 250GB of their hard drive space for you?

[md]

I've managed to get most of the stuff I really care about backed up to other drives; fortunately it was just a data drive so my computer still works fine (other then 0 free space now). And by fail I mean that the seek motor has died. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

As for havign 250gb of data; it's easy! Multiple feature length films, a month of continuous mp3 play time; multiple gigs of pictures from res last year and the summer. You'd be surprised how fast it adds up.

And MysticVega, you can't cause a drive to fail by trying to write more data to it then it can hold. All that happens is you run out of space and can't store the remainind data. The drive failure and the amount of stuff on it are not related.

[Boo-chan]

Cornflake wrote:

a month of continuous mp3 play time;

Let me see 30*24*60=43,200 minutes in a month
Asuming that the average song length is 4 minutes, that means you have 10,800 songs that you listen too.

[md]

Boo-chan wrote:

Cornflake wrote:

a month of continuous mp3 play time;

Let me see 30*24*60=43,200 minutes in a month
Asuming that the average song length is 4 minutes, that means you have 10,800 songs that you listen too.

Ok I exagerated a little bit... it's only 447:51:02 (hours:minutes:seconds); which works out to about 19 days. Which is only 63% of a month

[codemage]

You can burn the data to DVD?

Almost 5 gigs @ $0.20 apiece is pretty cost-effective, and then you have an archive of everything.

Also, the stuff with audio won't compress much, but you can probably get an extra 10% or so out of the pictures.

[md]

DVD Burners cost money. And Like I said, I managed to get all the salvagable data onto other drives; out of ~210gb of data only ~80gb was recoverable. Fortunately most of that was the stuff that really mattered to me... movies can be downloaded again, as can songs (legally of course); pictures and chat logs I can't replace.

[[Gandalf]]

I think you've got it wrong Cornflake, a DVD burner would be a good choice. Like this you will have problems with your hdds, and need a new one once every ___ time. You don't need to buy a $1000 DVD burner, and prices on them are continuously dropping, and if you get one that can burn dual layers the use of your harddrive will diminish greatly. DVDs themselves cost maybe twice the cost of CDs, and dual layered ones a bit more. For things like movies and MP3s DVD's are perfect.

Storage = (your number of choice)gb
Cost of (HDD /w .5 * Storage) > Cost of (DVD Burner + DVDs /w Storage)

My dual layered DVD burner is working out quite nicely for myself .

[codemage]

I got my dual-layer multi-format burner for about $80 at Futureshop. Best computer investment ever.

I didn't think I'd be using it much, but I frequently back up data - and saved the money I thought I would've used to buy a bigger hard drive.

(I have a 60gig, I download heaps of stuff, and I'm never hurting for free space.)

[MysticVegeta]

[Gandalf] wrote:

I think you've got it wrong Cornflake, a DVD burner would be a good choice. Like this you will have problems with your hdds, and need a new one once every ___ time. You don't need to buy a $1000 DVD burner, and prices on them are continuously dropping, and if you get one that can burn dual layers the use of your harddrive will diminish greatly. DVDs themselves cost maybe twice the cost of CDs, and dual layered ones a bit more. For things like movies and MP3s DVD's are perfect.

Storage = (your number of choice)gb
Cost of (HDD /w .5 * Storage) > Cost of (DVD Burner + DVDs /w Storage)

My dual layered DVD burner is working out quite nicely for myself .

You are right. the prices are dropping, last time I saw one was around 40-50 bucks O_O

[md]

Right now I really don't care about costs. I have what I could recover (and some that I couldn't) on other drives, and the one that failed is covered by warranty. Replacing the drive == free. Besides, soon (year or so) writtable blu-ray drives will be available... why get a dvd burner now when I can get a blu-ray burner and a free drive later

[Andy]

umm cornflakes, if you're stil in waterloo, i can lend you my external hard drive casing, and that'll let you back up your stuff