cheap backup?

What's the cheapest, most reliable way to backup a 30 gig firewire drive? It's mostly wav files...

A cheapo IDE drive? - I heard folks are finding these so inexpencive that they are forcing clients to 'buy one' as storage for the DAW sessions once done... instead of the old CDR chore...

CDR's?

Anyone?

[C.Lambrechts]

yup, cheap IDE drives are definately a way to go .... but still more expensive then CDR's .... 100 CDR's 'll give you say 70 gig's of backup space. and they only cost like 20$ for a 100 pack on spindle. I've bought 2.000 paper covers for them a while ago for like another 30 $.

So, that and a program like retrospect is my way of making "cheap" backups right now.

Meg, I suppose those 30 Gigs consist of different projects, nicely organised in seperate folders.

Retrospect creates very convenient catalogues. a project of say 10 gigs would be a catalog of approx.14 or 15 CDR's. which you can label 1/15 ... 2/15 ... 15/15 ....

Now the great thing here is that if you ever need one specific file out of that backup or a few .... during restore you can select them and retrospect will tell you which CDR to insert while restoring. for example ... insert disc 10 etc etc ....

Another advantage is that you can search your catalogues for a specific file. avoid the hassle of connecting the ide drives and see if it's on there.

yet another great thing is that there is no 700mb file limit when using retrospect. where as if you would just use a program like toast you would be limited to that filesize. I have done it with 2.5 gig movie files. retrospect seems to "chop" the file into pieces that will fit on the CDR. and it allways uses maximum space on them ... so the full 700 or whatever size CDR you use.

and yet another great thing is that it runs in the background. you start the backup ... continue doing whatever you are doing and from time to time you'll hear a "ping" sound meaning that it will ask you to insert a new disc.

Not done at night .... no problem ... just stop it and continue the next day.

AND with 4.7 gig DVD's getting more and more affordable and especially the DVDR writers (last one we sold was a pioneer 104 for like 350 $) affordable ...

Sure .... IDE drives are cheap and their big advantage is of course that you hook them up and throw everything on there ..... A LOT faster then creating catalogs with retrospect.

Depends on how you look at it I guess. If it is a one time thing and it is 30 gig's at once .... go for the IDE imho .... if it is an ongoing process and with smaller sessions. Having catalogs at hand to look up things is VERY convenient.

And of course you can combine both .... use IDE drives AND retrospect and still keep the catalog files at hand to look up things.

Hey ... why didn't I think of that before .... hmmmm ... thanks Jules

Er... your welcome! It was... nothing!

[e-cue]

Well, there used to be some cool "Internet Drive Spaces", but about one experence of not being able to download, I called it quits. Plus, got help you if you're stuck with a 56K line.

Went into Fry's yesterday to pick up a 100 gig ata with a pyro firewire kit for backup of my audio files. Walked out with a 30 gig internal ata for my notebook instead. Still got the backup problem, but now I've got a bigger drive for my notebook. Yeah!
yell