Backing Up

I did our annual full backup last night and into the wee hours of this morning. It took 10 DVD's in total. One DVD held everything except MP3's and photos; those two directories filled the other nine. Obviously this is not a good strategy. For one, it's a pain to do, so I put it off. Second, the DVD's I have are not archival quality, so it's a crap shoot as to how long they will remain readable. Third, it is just dog slow doing it.

Besides all that, the largest directory (Movies) cannot be backed up to DVD's because nearly all the files are larger than what a DVD can hold. Nothing in there is as important as, say, our tax records, but it would still suck to lose it all. Tape drives, in my book, are a complete non-option at this point. They are just too expensive, the files are unreadable by anything other than the original hardware/software, and if burning a DVD is slow, backing up to tape is glacial.

So last night, I started a little experiment. I still have an aging Western Digital 60GB USB drive. I set up a batch job that uses xcopy commands (with the /D /S /C /I /R /K /Y switches) that dumps everything except the movies from the Drobo to the WD drive. Unplug it, hand it to Debbie to take to work and lock in her desk, and voi la: full copy of all our files in an unattended half hour or so, and easily stored off-site to boot. Once a week, she will bring it home, I rerun the batch job which updates changed files and adds new files (but does not remove deleted files), and give it back to her.

This is a short-term solution for a couple reasons. First, for those doing the math at home, there isn't a great deal of free space left on a 60GB drive holding 10 DVD's worth of files. Two or three more of our little weekend photography road trips, and it will be full. Second, this drive is already five or six years old and was starting to have some gremlins. But Western Digital makes a 120GB drive that Amazon sells for $75, so replacement isn't that painful. Over the next few months, I plan to pick up a couple that can be rotated to our off-site storage facility known as Debbie's Desk once a week, or anytime that I feel we need a backup (like after dumping a bunch of photos off the camera).

I may even go further than that and buy a USB drive just for annual backups. At $75, it would be pretty cheap to just plug the drive in, run the backup batch job, write the year on the drive with a Sharpie, and send it off-site to Debbie's Desk. I'm not sure how long a USB drive can sit around until all the 1's and 0's turn into 1/2's, but it's got to be good for a couple three years anyway. Each year, just buy a new drive. Eventually, the backups from three or four years ago can be reformated and used as door stops, building blocks for the kids, whatever. Which still leaves the Movie directory. There are USB drives up to and well beyond the 1TB capacity of our Drobo, but they tend to be slightly outside the casual-purchase price range. I may just not worry overly-much about it. If we get robbed or the apartment burns to the ground, we'll likely have bigger things to worry about than losing our digital copy of Wild Hogs.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, I'm sitting at home without much to do. I need to sign up for my last college class and order the books from Amazon, do some laundry and start thinking about what we will be doing for dinner tonight. I'm supposed to be working on the menu for the cafe, but I need questions answered and there isn't anyone around to answer them. I'm only scheduled to work 12 hours this week. Woo. Hoo. But that's all going to change when the new menu takes effect. Which I can't finish because three weeks into this, some basic decisions can't seem to get made. And which has items on it the cooks don't have the food to make anyway. But we're going to starting using the new menus tomorrow. Right.

In a little less than three weeks, I will be starting college classes. It looks like I made the right call by bunching everything up into five months; it's not like I'll have a job or anything.