Backup options?
After having the 300gig drive crash, now clacks and not even reconized by the system as present, I wonder how to back up large drives? Right now I will have a RMA 300gig replacement coming in for the defective drive, and also just ordered a 250gig drive. One of these will be used, the other stored as a backup. Problem is though, that 300gig drive worked perfect up untill it died. SO, if I had backed up everything to it the last day it worked perfect, then say 2 months later I needed that data restored, then that day would have been the NEXT DAY when the drive died and could not be read. So, if you follow my point, I don't trust a drive for backup, it could fail any day as this 300gig did! Is there any decent cheap options for backups that are reliable? In the old days we had tape drives. I see on Newegg tape drives for like $500. Kinda expensive for average ocasional use plus tape costs like $40 for 200/400gig. 200/400, I guess that's like in the old days 200 is actaul size and 400 is guess at for compressed sized at best? How far do MP3 and DVD files compress? I'm sure raw AVI will compress a great deal, and most other files I have. DVD R is only 4.7gig, and disks are questionable at best. Though DVD R disks are cheap, figuring 5 gigs per disk that's 50 disks to backup a full 250gig drive. In 50 disks it's good odds at least 1 or more disks will fail. So what's a person to do, take a chance on a drive dying in storage, spend $25 for DVD R and hope none fail also spends hours and hours burning, $540 for 1 tape backup is out of the question for a $70 drive. What am I missing? Use 3 $70 drives to back up one? $210 to make sure the data on a $70 drive is not ever lost? Surely 3 drives would not fail at same time right?

I wouldn't bother with tape. Get a big external HDD or NAS - it'll be cheaper and more reliable than a good tape drive. What you should seriously consider using is Windows Home Server. The reviews are looking real good on it. It's far more useful that a regular NAS and it also gives you the benefits of Shadow Copy. Good review here: http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/whs.asp Put it in a spare beige box and stick a bunch of drives on it. I use a combination of a big external HDD on my server and optical media. I have a 500Gb Western Digital MyBook USB HDD connected to my server. External drives are inherently more reliable because they are not in constant use unlike your main drive. Use backup software or a drive imaging app like Acronis and you can generally get close to 2:1 compression of the data so a 500Gb drive can hold nearly a 1Tb compressed. I go to a fair amount of extremes. My workstation and my wife's laptop both backup their documents folders, desktops, email folders, etc to the server every night. The server backs up these backups and everything important on the server to an external HDD once a week in four separate weekly backups (Week 1 thru 4). Once a month the server burns a Dual Layer DVD (18Gb compressed using backup software) with all the essential data backups that I label with the date and drop off at my walk-in safe deposit box at the bank. Personal photos are archived on the server and on CD in three copies (one goes in the safe deposit box). MP3 music is archived on the server and to DVD. My important data (business related) is synced to my pocket thumb drive every day, and to my car laptop once a week. My workstation's OS and Apps partitions get imaged to the external HDD on the server once a month using Acronis, and most of the other PCs in my house get their whole drives imaged every few months.