A Writer’s Backup Strategy: Part 1 – Introduction

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3 Responses

  1. Writer Dad says:

    I had one major data loss a few years ago. Now I overcompensate. Hopefully, I’ll never lose a thing (unless we’re all struck by an asteroid).

  2. Stephanie says:

    Hey there, good topic. Are you going to cover Drobos? I’ve been working with them lately and they seem pretty solid for home backups.

  3. Dustin says:

    Stephanie: I’m not really covering specific hardware, since external hard drives have become so commoditized. Drobos are an exception to that, of course, but well out of my meager price range.

    For the non-initiated, a Drobo is an external storage device that allows you to add up to 4 hard drives, of any size — and swap them out *without losing any data* when you need more storage. For isntance, you could put 4 250GB hard drives, which are below $100 US now, in for a Terabyte of storage (almost — Drobo duplicates a lot of data so that you don’t lose anything if a drive fails — that’s how you can swap out a full drive for a new one without losing any files). If your Drobo starts to get full, you just pull one of the 250 GB drives and replace it with a 500 GB drive, or an even larger one, and you’re good to go.

    Very cool technology, and not expensive compared to similar storage solutions — but not cheap by any means. Several hundred dollars for the unit, plus $100 each for the hard drives — it adds up! So I covet but do not own…