Herding files, Herding boxes

[doc_moreau]

Last night i finally got around to moving a bunch of crap around onto my external storage drive so that i could free up a little space on my main HDD... I've been wanting to do that for quite a long time

Comments

[xolo]

I'm slightly nervous about having some of that stuff in only one location (deleted it on my main drive once i put it on the external disk) ...because if that thing died i would lose a lot. Art stuff and music stuff. My life, basically. :-/

www.dropbox.com offers online storage for $10 a month, or free if you store less than 2G. You can (and I do) move back and forth from a paid to a free account as needs change.

I use it for mass backups before reformatting, as it's a lot easier than doing storage on disks. You install their client (they have one for linux too) and your space there shows as a directory. You just move or copy things as you would on a local directory.

[elgoatherd]

I've got a lot of VHS tapes to digitize and am currently also trying to figure out how best to get them onto a hard-drive without having to worry about losing everything if it goes wrong. DAS/NAS thingies are too expensive to justify, so I'll probably just save up for a new MB and set up a couple of 2TB drives in RAID 1.

At the moment I use a spare hard drive and Puresync (free) to back up.

[tyreenya]

Box wrangler :D

I will say, when I moved from PA to FL, then FL locations, banker boxes were a godsend (unicornsend?). Extra money, yes, but made moving, packing and stacking SO much easier.

<3 <3

[nahaniotieno]

Every time I move, I kept telling myself, "i'm gonna get rid of a bunch of this crap."

It never, ever happens.

[bxle]

A one-terabyte external hard drive costs about $150 now. It's not that much of a luxury any more.

When I bought my main computer (5 years ago) they were still expensive, so I backed up to DVD+R or DVD-R, and I still do because I never bothered to change my backup method. I do a monthly full backup and weekly incremental backups and I have a drawer full of discs. But the backup takes a long time and restoring a file takes even longer.

For my work computer I bought a one-terabyte eSATA drive (the computer has an eSATA port; same speed as internal SATA) and Norton Ghost 2003, the last good version of Norton Ghost. A full backup of 250 GB takes 30 minutes, and restoring a file takes about five minutes. If I had to fully restore to a new internal hard disk because of a crash, that would probably take one or two hours. Norton Ghost 2003 only handles Windows XP, so it has no future with Windows 7.