Your Precious Backups

I need to start backing up everything ^^;

Trying to burn out to DVDRs as much as I can for Backups. I have alot of HDD plugged into my desktop for now, and about 5 HDDs lying externally.

There's an awful lot of thing I can burn out, but I've been lazy =_="

(Pray hard to god no HDD die without at least giving me the sign it is going to)

I was originally keeping backups of backups on both an external drive and dvds, but then my collection started increasing so fast it would become too pricy way too fast.
So for now, I make sure I have double copy (drive+dvd, or drive+drive) of my fave series and risk deletion of some others.
Another downside of keeping that many copies is the managing of it all; right now I have a huge Excel sheeting detailing it all, but I'm working to learn access so I might organize it more easily ^^

I have a load of external hard drives, mostly the drives from old laptops with cheap HK eBay caddies. Anything important (photo's of my son for example) will go on DVD and a drive. I have had plenty of drives die, and DVD-R's decide they no longer want to work. Programs, series, etc I can re-download, but would be devastated if I lost the photo's.

I rely on the occasional internet news posting regarding hard drive failure to remind me to make backups ^^; it's been a while; I personally don't value much data but sometimes burn my own works to the current popular optical disc format.

BTW, Danny, do you have a means for monitoring HDD temps?

Of all computing components, cooling is most sensitive for hard drives to extend the working life, since they are mechanical...

Backup by burning into dvd~ though sometimes Im even lazy to do backup~

BlyRay is 25Gb per layer~ max is 4? or 6 layer it can goes up~ that is what i heard~

blu ray drives and disks are too expensive for backing up the level of volume I have. I stick to my external hard drives as a point of backup and only a small portion of stuff is stored on DVDs and the like.

BTW, The capacity of a blu ray disk is 25GB but they can be stacked so dual layer disks hold 50GB and so on. Not sure if the recorder drives have caught up to take advantage tho...

No backups for me at this point. I can't buy an HDD ext backup because my money is always spent on figures and kits. xD
BTW, thanks for reminding, now I need to burn files on dvds to create backup.

T_T I very scare about losing everything on my hdd as well..... very precious for me

i just keep backing up stuff onto dvds as and when a series is completely downloaded. As for hdd's i use acronis. so even if the hdd is of smaller size it doesn't matter as the program just compresses the backup before writing but only upto a certain extent. anyway 500Gb to 1TB hdd's are quite cheap now.

Used to burn my data, now I only have an external HD which is still new.
I need to do backups ....now where was that HD ^^

Two good NAS with a nice raidsetup and bout 2TB storage each works fine for me unless the big thunderstorm comes and does toast it. ^^ (nah i got a security power adapter and whatsonot for that as well)
For things which shall be stored longer i usualy use DVDs, at least atm but i think i could lean towards blueray sometime sooner or later as well... at least when the DVDs get their "age" that they could fail and i need to copy around again. *cough* :D

It didn't surprise me that your HD died when I saw the brand. Maxtor sux, buy Seagate.

I suffered a HD death last year. It was the most depressing experience, since I lost all my personal pics, memorable works and music. I've had a couple of dead HDs, but this was the worst. I was considering taking the HD to a data recovery place, but I'm kind of skeptical. I don't want my personal things being copied and leaked. It took me almost close to a year to accept the fact that I've lost everything.

As for backups, I only burn the REALLY important things and anime onto DVD. I have a portable 2.5" drive that I use to transport work/music to and from my office.

at first I only relied on my WDC 320GB as my backup, but later bought some dvd burner and burn DVD+ for my backups.. which reminds me, do DVD+ burn much slower than DVD-?

I built a raid-5 system with 4 X 750GB hard drives(so 3TB).

But only 2.25TB are accessible for writing, 750GB is kept for redundancy. So if I lose a drive(any one of the four), I just need to replace it and all the data is still there.

I wanna try out the Drobo with 4 X 1TB(4TB!) next. http://www.drobo.com

For my home use I have a 1 TB network hard drive that I store my back ups on. The back up job runs every two weeks keeping my stuff pretty up to date. The odds of that backup drive dying and my normal drives dying at the same time are pretty slim. I still find the best way to back up a server is to use tape back ups. You can easily get 200 GB per tape and the tapes themselves don't take up huge amounts of room.

I used to keep DVD backups... and before that, CDs.
But lately, I'm not making backups as I should.
Too much stuff.

Sometimes I just don't learn from my errors... I have a horror story.
Sometime ago a 300Gb external HDD failed on me, and it had more than 290Gb of non-backuped data... including stuff like most of the pics I took in Japan, several documents, and other stuff very important to me.

It was like loosing a part of my life... and in fact, it was, since it took me a long time to gather all that.

If BD-Recorders weren't so expensive around here, I'd buy one too.
DVDs just ain't enough these days...

I have copies of most data on local HD, DVD and a 1TB Nas. I have also shared my anime with a friend so almost anything could be retrieved from him. If you want to talk about paranoid though my photos are on Internal HD, External usb HD, Nas, DVD (Multiple copies), A hidden partition on my sisters machine, An encrypted partition on my work machine and Flickr.

I use 2 external HDs (1,5 TB) when i have something to backup.

I recently outgrew practically using DVDs as backup. What's sad is that just 2 years ago, when I first got my iMac, I was able to back up EVERYTHING on a single CD. Then again, at the time I was using an ancient frankencompy that took forever to do anything and only had intermittent internet, which was probably a huge factor in my data usage. ^^;

Still, I really should get an external hard disc. There's just too much stuff that I'd rather not loose, and after having a hard disc get totally PWNed by spyware in the past, I know it's better to be safe than sorry.

Right now Bluray is a bit expensive to use as backups in my opinion, I would stick to an external HD for backups.

I'm guilty of not backing up enough.... But in recent months I did buy a 500gb ex hd, which keeps all my anime nice and snug. I've backed it up onto dvd's aswell though. Just to be safe. Since my computer has a crappy 80gb(66.5gb because of Vista...:hissss: hd I really needed the 500gb lol.

Losing a hard drive can be heart breaking. About three years ago my Mac Mini's HD failed. I lost about 20Gb of music files that I failed to back up. The other files were of no concern, but one third of my music files were gone and of course the important iTunes database. Since then I have been synchronizing my important data to two other separate HD. My music, photo, and important data files are backed up this way. ChronoSync seems to work well on my Mac Pro.

I used to backup to DVDs but it takes time and lots of DVDs. My music is over 100 GB and photos are approaching 100 GB very fast. I also test each DVD to see if it copies back the data to a hard drive with out errors.

The Blu-Ray route for backups is on my mind too. Like everyone else, I am starting to collect spindles of DVDs all containing AVIs. The AVIs are mostly of JDramas that I have enjoyed. My anime is comparatively small. Once I am done with a series it gets backup immediately to DVD. Should a HD fail containing AVI, it would not be a great loss for me.

I've lost everything on my old computer when the hard drive died, which includes a whole bunch of old photos. Now I backed up pretty much all my old files onto my lap top and burned all my anime onto DvDs.

Whole series? yeah, there's da-anime.org. A really lifesaver

Dear Danny, you may try "http://www.carbonite.com/" online backup, I tested it a year ago.
Currently profiling my hardisk data to DVD, Blu Ray burner is still cost a buck in M'sia ^^;

Stay away from Maxtor ^^

All the hard drives i had dead or with problems are Maxtor , never had any problems with Seagate :p

Now i would love to buy a Blu Ray burner but it still too much money ... sadly :(

What a coincidence...
My father's HD also died yesturday.. and it was a Maxtor.

I back up all my stuff on HDs and DVDs.

I never keep a lot of backups. Just some CD-Rs and DVD-Rs with videos, photos and other data that's important to me. I thought I would take it worse when my main hard drive died recently, but there wasn't much important stuff there... XD

I'd like to see if it's possible to recover a few things from it sometime soon, but if it's totally dead then I don't really care, since I had pretty much all of my personal works uploaded on the web and ready to redownload.

Blu Ray's seems nice but I don't have anything worth backing up that would take advantage of their capacity, so I'll prolly be sticking to DVD-Rs for awhile.

I used to burn everything to DVD-Rs, but after having burnt a few hundred this strategy got a bit too tedious. Currently I keep all my media and some backups on 2TB of external drives (1x1TB, 1x500GB, 2x250GB).

i don't have any off-site backups yet... in the meantime raid 5 protects me from a single hd failure ^_^ in the past it's been tedious cd/dvd burning...

In my field you quickly learn how important backups are. And I mean live ones, not to optical. If you lose 1TB of data that you archived optically, it'll take 20 blu-ray disks and several hours to recover it (not even going to talk about standard DVD ;)
If you have a backup drive though, just pop it in and away you go.

DL (Dual Layer) is 50 GB and SL (Single Layer) is half that size. Only problem is most RE (Record/Erase) disc I have seen are SL and not DL. Have you seen BD-RE DL disc in Tokyo? I was pricing players back in June while in Osaka. There is not much selection here in the states yet in the way of burners and disc are too expensive.

Right now, I have a 1TB drive -attached to my Airport Extreme using Time Machine- and use three HDs to clone my two Macs OSX partitions. I keep the Windows partitions backed up to DVD. I was thinking about going to a network 1TB RAID...

I don't keep every series I watch so I usually back up those up to DVD-R DL disc or dumped to an HD. Most other files are moved to DVD. I'm very conservative about what I back up since I can't keep everything. What really worries me the most is my music and photo libraries. Both are very quickly becoming too large to back up. Right now I only back up purchased music and important iTunes files and photos to DVD. In the future I made move these to a RAID.

I don't back up very much cause I need those ???-TB for my stuff. I just make Time-Machine backups to restore the OS without problems @ my Second PC and Vista-Complete-PC Backups from my system-partition @ my main-system sometimes. I don't want to back up things on DVD's or Bluerays cause I hate those small, slow opticial storage things.

Are you using Time Machine, Danny?
Cause I think that's the best Backup-solution out there.

And yeah, there are sites with nearly every series :)

I always use an external HDD for backup my PC. I can't trust something like DVDs. >,<"

I'd backup on DVDRs if I had better organization of my doujinshi collection. It's hard to rifle through all the stuff I had before I learned to use original filenames, renaming, purging duplicates, etc etc... especially with several thousand doujinshi. With anime I try to keep them to DVDs, but sometimes they get a few megs over and I get testy about whether I should reencode some, use an overfill CD, or if it's worth burning. I keep my large capacity drives external so I can regulate how long and how often they get used. Maybe it's some naive peace of mind.

If you want whole series, you might be lucky and find something on a torrent index in some dark corner of the internet.

My current method of backups are DVD-Rs right now but that will change in the next month or so to HDDs. Since collecting anime series, music, h-games, and software take a lot of space really quickly, having an external HDD would come in handy. Currently i'm thinking of a plan of building another computer to be used as a file server, using a large tower that could contain many HDDs at the same time so i would be able to access the backup data through the network instead of having to "plug-in" the HDD every time i need it.

There is a 6 TB fileserver running raid 5 sat under my stairs :D, so if a HDD does die i just grab a new one and everything is restored automatically... Also i attend a LAN party every 6 weeks and we all essentially have complete clones of each others fileservers so if anything majorly goes wrong i can always get it back in no time.

Yeah, definitely sux when that happens.

Just recently, I had a Western Digital 500GB external USB drive which died on me after 12 months. So I'm just sticking with their smaller but more-reliable WD 100-120 GB sizes. As for downloads and/or personal backups, I've burned hundreds of 4GB DVD discs. The only problem is their rumored 5-to-10-year lifespan before they degrade; but no matter, the solution is just to re-burn them again.

Don't know the degradation rate of Blu-Rays, but your massive HD sizes are a totally different dilemma from mine. Sorry I can't help! ^_^;

P.S. Like "WiseFreeman" mentions above, Ipswitch has an online solution called "Carbonite" (a la Han Solo, lol). Might wanna check it out.

Luckily, I've never had a problem with a hard drive dying. I don't really backup things other than important documents and stuff (which are normally small enough for a quick FTP back up.), Most of the stuff I'd want backed up I normally pass on to others... so if I ever lose it I can just get it back from them ^^;

And I'm surprised how cheap Blu-ray disks are there... a 5-pack of 25GB Blu-ray disks are around (an equivalent of) ¥10000 here.

I depend on HDDs, as I hate the idea of hundreds of thousands of DVDs scattered all over the place. I tend to duplicate data across my PCs, as well as using memory sticks and a basic NAS (thanks Netgear) that unfortunately is a bit slow. I like XJAYMANX's idea of using smaller hard drives, especially if you can get your hands on server-grade HDDs (despite the extra cost).

Wow... Blu-Ray media got cheap without me paying attention. I wish drives would go down in price around these parts.
Right now my primary machine is a sweet new laptop and I spend the weekend backing up everything from my PC to it (I know it's kinda backward). But at least now I've got everything in two places (more or less).

I have never backed up anything in my life...never lost anything either :D

I usually just back up most of my stuff on DVDs. But I also have a second internal HD that I use Time Machine to back everything up onto. I love how user friendly Time Machine is for retrieving lost files and such.

Buy some cheap, big hard disks and make yourself a RAID. If you have a Mac, the RAID software is built into OSX. You can probably get it as shareware on Windows.

Non-technical people can buy ready-made RAID units which you just plug in. They are more expensive.

A 500GB RAID will hold many hours of compressed video.

I'm guilty of not backing up. I have very little means of doing so in the first place. I could burn to dvd but that means any changes I make to data can't be copied to the dvd, and I usually make many changes, constantly adding more files, using important files, adding more music. I'm in the process of convincing my mom that we need a NAS, we have 3 desktops and 3 laptops, none of them are backed up. We definitely need a NAS.

I burn all of my backups on DVD-Rs which is cheap and can just be stored cleanly on my cabinet.

I've been thinking of moving to HDD backups and buy some cheap desktop HDDs since I think that's much more cheaper compared to DVD-R backup

I burn watched anime off to DVDs and then delete them from my harddrive. I think it's a waste to have it sit there taking up space forever while I go on to watch something completely different. Unless of course the series is golden. Then I make an exception.

...Unfortunately my music/recording library alone is getting too big for my puny harddrives!

I had one time that my HD died and don't have the back up. It hurts. Now I try to keep copied of the files I need on multiple HD on one computers and most of the pictures and stuff on multiple computers. It is a pain some times and I am a little behind now.
Hopefully I'll catch up before anythign goes crap..

oh the crappy moment when u see ur backup HD dead...such thing just happened to me yesterday... as for backups I recommend several formats: DVDs, [ blue rays if are available ], a dedicated HD [ which someday will fail as well =( ] and an online solution. I discovered some place who offers 5 GBs to upload any kind of file, and 25 GBs for vid, pic, and audio files. Hey that's the free option, paid options offer moar space for your "health care files" ;). ohh right the site is: www.humyo.com hope it helps.

Dell had a sale earlier this year.. 500GB external HD for 100$ so glad i got it :)

Back up? What's that? ... j/k

What exactly are you guys backing up that you need terabytes of storage space? I can understand if it involves your line of work (i.e. what Danny does). Hmmm? Suspicious. ^_^;

speaking of backups: WHich program do you guys use to do your backups? I have Roxio. But last time it didn't burn all the files i put on there.

I make a backup of my data about once a week and store it on my external HDD. Additionally I burn the most important data on a CD or DVD once in a while.

Wow bluray is cheap over there! For one disc it's about 16-20 dollars here in the US.

Most often than not, I burn what videos, pics or mp3 to DVD's and leave on my hard drive only the most frequently used stuff. and for master file back up I have an external HDD which contains only the most important stuff.

i need to pickup another external drive, my current one is almost full and about only 50% of it has been backed up. never had the displeasure of having any of my HDs fail yet though.

Well the trick to prolonging your HDD's life is just to turn your PC off whenever your not using it --_-- ... and maybe some cooling lol (personally have another machine liquid cooled X_x )

Yeah I need to start making back-ups soon on either external HD's or discs or i'll be one sad son of a .......

The problem right now is my budget. It's really bad right now.

Aaaah, the loathesome Maxtor drives. Maxtors of certain generations are well known for their sudden short stops and failures.

I don't so much as run a backup as I do operate on a basic raid. I use mirroring in my case, and my server uses a 1+0 setup for mirror-basic stripe. Helps keep things sane when one drive goes take a brake-less bike ride downhill too close to the train lines. :x

Other than that, I only burn things off as I get close to being too full.

I would say I'm pretty lucky, I've never had a HD just suddenly die. I have an old (I'm talking really old, 20gb hd) glitch on me but I was able to transfer data off of it so that was fine.

Danny, here something you might want to try, freeze fixing your drive:
http://www.gearlog.com/2007/11/its_really_most_sincerely_dead.php
just in case you have some data in there you need to recover. it'll work for just a few minutes though, however a few minutes is all you'll probably need to copy your more important files to another hard drive.

If you want a good solution, you need to spend $$$$ and get SAS drives and a controller card. The MTBF (mean time before failure) on any enterprise drive is at least double a normal drive you buy. (it doesn't need to be SAS to be enterprise class).

The problem is cost. The controller card is expensive as are the drives, BUT they last much much longer.

On a side note, don't run enterprise drives in anything but a SAS or SCSI setup. The error rate recovery for enterprise is 8ms, then it quits trying. This is because the SAS or SCSI card is expected to do the recovery (and always does). If you run that type of drive in a normal PC, you can have high loss rates. On a consumer SATA drive the error recover time is 80-100ms because there is no SAS or SCSI card that will do the recovery. I say this because you can get SATA enterprise drives, but they are really meant to be run in an array.

i cant decide whether it would be worth it to go out and buy a blu-ray drive for backing up purposes, or just to get a new HDD

I backup the most crucial parts and divide them to categories, such as art books, games, series, pr0n....

Whilst reading this article, I'm starting to backup some files on to my unused HDD now since I feel that my current backup HDD is near the end of its life...

In the past I would prioritize anime to be backed up as soon as I finished watching the series. Lack of storage space was the reason why I backed up files so frequently. I would burn them on to 4.7gb DVD's, Only problem was, after a few years when I want to rewatch them I find the DVD is partially degraded. Some end up not readable.

Used to have the following:
2x300gb HDDs
1x200gb HDD

Put those to use elsewhere, and upgraded to
1x500gb
4x500gb in RAID5
The theory there was that I would store everything of value (things that couldn't easily be re-downloaded, re-installed... or like digicam pictures, etc) on the RAID5 which theoretically is safe, and then the rest on the 500gb.

Recently was both running out of space and needed a new harddrive for another computer. Figured I'd get a 1tb to replace the 500gb, and put the 500gb into the other computer.
Now, however, I have almost as much stuff NOT secured (that is, not on the RAID5) as I do secured.
If I had more money I would upgrade my computer to have 3 or 4 1tb drives in a RAID5, then 2x1tb in a RAID1. This would offer me security, performance, and storage capacity.

I don't back up anime to DVDs as I have had many bad experiences with burning things to DVDs only to find that when I try to use the DVDs they are corrupt, etc. Backing up to Blu-ray is enticing, but as you can see, right now I have 2.5tb of storage. That's not very easy to back up any way you slice it - thus RAID is the best option for me, I think.

Only a 100GB - HDD laptop. .

I will use external HDD, and burn animes in DVDs, perhaps..

I backup pretty regularly: I backup to flash drive (4GB) on a daily basis, and then a full backup for that week onto my external HDD at the end of every week. Backup is good. I know of people who have lost a huge amount of important data because of failure to backup. The results are not pretty.

I have an extra HDD for backups but... it's the same one I use to stash all my anime, manga and eroge so...
It's a bit tough to have it all on one HDD. I have learned that dvd's are bad, with that whole 'cyclic redundency check' error and all ^^;

My backup's backup are always stored on optical media simply because they last longer than HDDs imo. Most HDDs have a lifespan of 5 years or less that's why I keep my precious data on dvds. My only complain though is that these dvds can really pile up

I work on a data recovery firm. I think there are many companies who can restore your data (but it will be expensive). There is no perfect backup plan, we receive a great number of USB disks in what people store their valuable information, but they are very delicate and even a little fall can damage the inner components. Every hard disk is an electromechanic device, subject to stress, heat, surges, smashes, flood, etc. Even if you choose RAID or DVDs, a disaster still can occur. I think you can do your backups easily (try Cobian backup, freeware), save your data in different locations, use carbonite-like services, say your prayers, pay your dues, eat vegetables and dont love too much your info!

I use to only have an external HD, but I back up stuff on DVD-R, I prolly do blu-ray when it gets cheaper in the future...

I will never buy another Maxtor Drive again, mine died a few months ago also, searching on the web and people also have the same problem with Maxtor drives.

I mostly burn everything to DVDs, since my connection with the intarwebz isn't that big ^^"

hi all i think the best way to to save your backup is tp buy an 160GB ipod and use it as an external HD coz you know the ipod dont die easily but,the only problem is the price of the ipod but if its important data then the mony wont be a problem, so i think its the best way to save your backup coz i use it and its not that bad

If that kawaii girl spills her coke on your HDD you're looking for trouble.

I used 6x500GB HDDs for my backup... ahh lots stuff need to be saved.

from what i know blu-ray recorder drives still have outrages price... its cost around 120.000yen if last time i check... at least until mid next year i expect the price still higher than 100k
HDD maybe the best solution rightnow (in term reliability+usage as you can write as much as you want)... as 500mb WD/Seagate drives cost only around 6000yen (standard desktop line/type)

for the cheapest way... buy good drive (new Pioneer S-J16 looks good), burn DVD-DL (dual layer 8gb) imo

other than that... entry level tape recorder might good for backup-ing since tape technology rarely changed

for me... still using DVD-R to backup files.. to make sure the reliability, i use good dvd-r such as TDK Durabis line and writted them in 4x speed only
for files that often updated such as software/patch... i backup them on DVD-RAM (BD-RAM should awesome when available)

Only do backups for thing I can't re-have elsewhere. Like part of prog-line or stories I made. Other things like video can be re-download :)

I have 2 external HDs. One that keeps on getting corrupted files. I store all the anime in the WD drive, the original copy, and back up on DVD and on the other drive.

I do not have any anime on my 2 main drives. Mostly programs, videos, pics and games on those.

I don't back up my stuff at all....
That's bad, right?

Backup is always such a pain, there really needs to be some innovation in the area!

At work we have an Overland device with 400gb tapes, we still lose data on a regular occurance due to power cuts, in-compatibility and lack of space.

Anyway, I think that something like a Blue Ray (with a backup of itself somewhere else) would be a good bet :)

We usually use external hard disks here. 1 Terra byte cost around 19000 Yen. Cheap!

I only backup the drive where my OS is to external disk, rest are on their own. Haven't had any HD's that would have failed so bad I wasn't able to get the data back before the disk was totally dead. I wouldn't backup anything if I had to do it manually but Leopard's Time Machine is such an easy-to-use program that as long as I have the drive space there's no reason why I wouldn't keep it on.

About the magical place for series, www.boxtorrents.com is that magical place. It's great place for completed series and has reliable seeds.

I back up everything useful (documents, pictures, game saves etc)to external hard drive from all the computers in my family (currently 2 desktops and 3 laptops) regularly every Friday evening. Software-side I use Norton Ghost to make backup images of hard drives. It is a lot faster than copying hundreds of small files. Because of that, I usually hold all of the important stuff in one given computer on one drive (usually not the system drive), so only one drive must be backed up. But if needed, I back up the system drive too for fast recovery. I usually don't hold a longer backup archive than 2 backups for a computer. So drive space for backups in not an issue yet:)

DVD for the time being. Fingers crossed that my stuff dont magically burn!

NAS with Mirror Raids ~
I am using those with 500gb mirror ~
Need more space ? Another NAS with 500gb hdd x 2 ~

I think burning it to Blu Rays would be much safer. That's at least what I think anyway. It's just too much work for HDs. Not mentioning it's cheaper too.

only use a piece of 500gb external hdd ^^;

I usually burn into DVDRs, but the new and fresh data will be in my HD for a while(few days to few weeks), unwanted data will gone.

Lots of hard drives, especially now with Apple's Time Machine making it so easy. I currently have just under 3TB of drives backing up the 4 active computers in the house. I've also used SuperDuper! with a great deal success for automated backups. Even all this is no guarantee I won't lose something eventually.

I don't have a back-up... XD
I need external drives >.>
I have too many video files XD (anime mostly, plus images and scans (of my own illus))

2TB Seagate HDD 7200 RPM 64MB Cache [2 X 1000 GB]

RAID-1 & Time Machine on Leopard

Currently 86% Full. Damn, what the hell do I download?

woowowow....yah.
i think i need to send all of my data to my rewritable DVD.....

be careful danny....

I burn anime fansubs and MP3s on DVD-R and pics on CD-R as backup (in case something happens or if I need to format) mostly considering the fact that I have like 8 USB keys (around 18GB, 2 of them are 256 and one is 512MB), which I use for saving other applications. Hooray for CD-Rs and DVD-Rs.

Trying to back up your system is nest to impossiable to do. My dad used to be an IT manager adn it really very hard to do. With updates on tons of applications and programs the idex becomes obsolete fast.

I just back up some of my documents and media file the old fashion way and keep it an exteran hard drive. I only back up a few program files.

Time Machine and DL DVD for important archives. That ice cube case looks exactly like mine! (minus the figure) Ive given up on the outer casing...

I just use normal CD-R's