Ok now that I archived my music, I don't want to go through this process again and I want to back it up preferably using a cheap but good solution. I am looking for the following features:

• External drive support.
  
• Ability to backup entire disk image for future restore.
  
• Ability to reflect the changes (let's say every month) to my original drive (incremental up-to-date).
  
• I'd also appreciate an error recovery with minimum extra cost in additional space requirement.

Also what kind of external drive should I get for cheap but nice solution? An USB 2.0 hard disk or a tape backup device or something else?
Thanks for suggestions.

I sell computer stuff for a living. I've been recommending this company's product to my customers. You plug it in and it starts a backup. It is not a compressed proprietary image; it is a mirror of your drive. The best part about that is, if your internal drive fails, you open the enclosure take out the drive from your backup device and install it as your new internal drive.

http://www.cmsproducts.com/product_backup_desktop.htm

A backup system must be easy and fast to use. Otherwise the backup process is always pushed a day into the future.

I use an old computer running linux with extra disks. It has a 380 Gb raid0 drive. Backup is done with rsync every week and it painless. It is not an incremental backup, as it replaces old files. However, a normal incremental backup does not detect removed files. Having to manually delete files again after a complete restore can be annoying. Especially if you rename or move the files.

I had my computer stolen a few years ago without really any backups
it was one of the worst feelings you can have when years of work was lost like that.

So now I'm pretty nurotic about keeping backups.
Personally I usually buy 2 hard drives at a time and use one in a removable tray ($35USD) and mirror the data. Every week I do a mirror backup which usually takes about 15mins for 4 HDs. This works for me since it requires the smallest investment, the hard drive, and they are a little easier to sell down the road, I would think it is a little harder to get rid of one of those units dewey1973 was mentioning.

I do a Ghost backup of the C: drive about once a month since you can't really mirror the system drive. The Ghost works well (test your sytem out before you actually have to depend on it) since my C drive is a SCSI-NTFS and if i was replacing it I would do it with an IDE - NTFS now - ghost handles this situation nicely.

As I said this works for me - idealy it would be great to have a remote computer hooked by 1GB ethernet and just mirror over the network. When you are talking about sync'ing or mirroring 120GB HDs (4 of them) i found the time way too slow for USBv1 and pretty slow on 100MB ethernet. When the drives are in the caddy (it will be great when SATA drives are more popular - I think you can hot-swap them?) they are just another drive and you can have whatever the HD transfer rate is, which is ideal if there is a fair bit of data to update.

Just a few points on your comments;
- Caddys are external - you pop them in to do back-ups then keep them safe - like in the dishwasher
- A disk "image" is usually just performed on a OS disk to preserve the OS as it is, in case of problems. There is not much point in creating an "image" of your music files.
- there are a few programs which do mirroring/incremental backup depends which OS you have
- This is also a bit dependant on OS since my drives are formated in NTFS which already has built in error checking - i guess i could add extra error checking but on 120Gb (or even 20GB) of music files I can imangine it taking quite awhile to produce a error recovery file!

Anyhow get back with some more specifics and we might be able to give some better choices

@dewey1973: Thanks. But your solution is a bit too expensive. I'd like to buy it on eBay actually. Even if it's not on eBay it should be available at many places so that I can get a good price. I'd like to pay around $150 for 120GB drive, or maybe I'll go for tape backup.

@TwoJ: I have Windows XP running on a 80GB NTFS (Western Digital IDE). I'd like to buy a future drive for FreeBSD so all my IDE slots will be full. That's why I wanted an external solution (preferably USB2). What's a caddy? Is it some adapter for internal drives?

I am going to archive my OS not only the music files, so that I can recover all my software too. That's why I need an image backup.

A caddy is a unit -you can see on this Page that fits in a 5.25 slot in your case which has a removable tray which holds a standard hard drive. it is an easy way to add another HD to your system without having to open the case. The only real downside to it is that unlike USB devices, IDEs are not hot-swapable, meaning that you can attach them while the computer is running, to add a HD you have to shut the system down and then turn the key on the caddy which supplies the power to the HD, then turn the system back on. A bit of a pain but i still find it the most economical solution for my needs

you can also pick up a caddy for $21USD as well as a IDE Controller card (i have a promise 100 which you can also find on that site) for 30USD. The controller card will give you an additional 4 IDE ports so you'll have 8 in total. The caddy still becomes an external storage unit since you are not opening the case.
I think you will find that most USB2 backup units (or pretty much any other type) are pretty expensive compared to the system that i'm proposing since with those units you are locked into a proprietary format which is not easily upgraded. If you just use plain ol' HDs when you need a bigger one you get it do the update and sell your ol HD to a friend. As i said there will be a lot more people to buy a standard 80GB HD then an 80GB USB2 backup unit.

INHO you should seperate your OS from your music - then do an image of the OS and just plain backup of the data(music). There is a fair bit of overhead doing an image of your music files when it is not really necessary and a little redundant. But as you wish - I would suggest Symantec (norton) Ghost - it is pretty much the standard for doing an image of your drive.

Hmm I guess I'll go for USB2 still. I can find 120GB ones at $150 on eBay. Instead of paying $20 for caddy and $30 for additional IDE card I think this solution is better because I can take it out and plug it somewhere else and it is hot swappable. Can I boot from an external drive?

Does the Ghost allow access to individual files after backup? Maybe I should indeed do a separate backup of my OS and music files. Maybe Ghost will allow me do so. Can I use the same external drive (let's say) for backing up different devices (like my music folder, OS folders or my other drive) using Ghost?

Thanks a lot for your help, I appreciate it.

Yes- if you configure it properly you can have a normal internal boot HD as well as another caddy boot HD which has priority when installed.

You can configure Ghost to exclude certain directories. If you keep your music and OS on the same HD it is a little useless doing a backup of each since an image of your music will contain your OS as well.
- That I'm not sure of - you can check out their webpage and see if they mention it.

I guess it depends on the unit you buy - I know some have proprietary software which only allows you to use that software to save/restore - a big minus to me if you ever don't have that software.
I really don't have too much experience with those units - i would suspect some are capable and some are not. Ghost will allow you to backup to virtually anything that appears in explorer including CD-RW but some backups use special formats to save data so Ghost cannot save to such propritary formats. - This should be a factor in your choice as well.

Your welcome - I tried a few methods (burning 60GB to CD-RW ) before i got to this method. To me since I have a fair bit of data (>500GB) which when backing up there are some priorities such as cost,speed, easy to do, etc. Each one has their own needs and i hope that your choice will satisfy your needs for the forseeable future

It really depends on the value of what you want to back up.

For my business/accounts data, I need multiple redundant backups, on the grounds that I would literally become bankrupt in very short order if I were to lose this data. However, the really critical stuff easily fits onto one CD-R.

I think this is overkill for my music collection, however, which runs to about 30GB (mainly MPC's) ATM. I simply back it up to cheap CD-R's (one generation), and if I lose a few albums, well, big deal, I can re-rip from the original source or, ahem "re-aquire" it from wherever I got it from in the first place. Hell, if I liked the music that much, I might even (gasp) buy it again from a record store.

Music is easily replaceable. Granted, CD-R's do die, but you have to keep a sense of proportion, ie you might end up spending more on what you perceive as a totally reliable backup solution than would cost you to replace the data from commercial sources. Also, it's worth bearing in mind that if you keep all your backup data on one humonguous external HDD, you are comprehensively fucked if aformentioned drive goes pop, whereas not all of your backup CD-R's will die simultaneously unless your house catches fire, in which case it would be the least of your problems

I backed up on CDs & CD-RWs for awhile but then the amount of data just became too large to justify using them, plus the cost/GB was basically equivalent to HD space (probably HD space is cheaper now), plus the time burning, plus the storage, plus the possibility of scratchs/bad CDs etc. All this added up to using HDs. the same reasons for not using DVD-RW

I guess you would be fucked if your 1st hard drive failed and then your back-up failed as well. Since my backup HDDs see max 100hrs/year they're not going to be approching that MTBF. I think the chances of both primary & backup both failing is so remotly small it could hardly be calculated. And on that infinitesimal chance that the backup failed it would most likely be due to mechanical failure and there are companies that specialize in data recovery, and that is one of the easiest recoveries, if the data is worth it. If your drives do not have mechanical problems then there is also softare data recovery.

So overall I think that is such a non-possibility that it doesn't bear consideration.