How long does it take to backup 2 TB over the Internet with a 3 Mbit/sec connection? Days, weeks, months?
You do incremental backups. Anyway, you need to arrive at a strategy that works for you; there are lots of options. Even though hugh drives are cheap, most of us don't have terabytes of actual data to back up.

Religion and philosophy are not going to protect my data. :D

Would you like it better if I said that you are at the mercy of the Great Subatomic Whizzing of the Universe? ;) :p :D

I do agree that CYA is important and the more CYA the better. (Within reason.)

What I'm getting at is that people have the tendency to think that they are universally protected when they have digital backups.

The only thing that I don't really like about digital data storage is that you really aren't storing anything. You are only storing a set of instructions.

If I sent you a letter in Microsoft Word format, I'm not really sending you a letter. I am only sending you a set of instructions which can be used to reproduce a letter. Until you send that file to the printer and you hold a piece of paper in your hand and read it, you do not have a letter.

When you scan a photo and store it as a file you are only storing a set of computerized instructions with which you can reproduce a photo. Not until it is printed out and you hold it in your hand and look at it do you have a photo. Negatives are photographs AND they are instructions with which you can easily reproduce a photograph.

Scanning a negative and storing it as digital instructions is a good thing to do because an image is now backed up in case of loss or damage but, regardless of whether it is stored on film or on a hard drive, a photograph is just as susceptible to loss, theft or damage.

I don't think one method is inherently better than the other. Each has its strengths and downfalls. What I am getting at is that a photograph can be lost just as easily as a digital copy and there is little we can do to prevent it.

We are at the mercy of The Great Subatomic Whizzing of the Universe. ;)

Got a new computer and LED monitor $$$&$$$$ big one. I also got a terabyte of storage drive.

How do I back it up? Another T1 drive or 5 & a 1/4 floppies? No smile face on my iPhone.

Got to finish my room now, I,m down at a carbon workshop and having fun, fun, fun, but nothing lasts forever so home soon. I made a nice carbon print from an old negative of Pt Lobos using my own homemade glop tissue. I'm making more tomorrow, with luck.

Curt

Depends on your backup system.

If you are using "Time Machine" or something similar, the computer will keep incremental backups until the drive fills up. Then it will start deleting the oldest incremental backups to make room for new stuff.

*IF* you don't fill up your computer full of junk you can get away with a 500 GB for a while. Time Machine will start deleting old information when the drive gets full. If you end up with 500 GB of new information that the system can't figure out what to delete, it will "choke." But it will buy you some time.

Best solution is to get a 1 TB or larger. (You can get 2 TB drives now!)

I've got a routine going now, where I've got several working data drives for different things (writing, photography, video, other archives), and it all gets backed up every night incrementally to a larger drive (currently 1TB), except for the flash drive that contains my academic work, and that gets backed up manually in full as frequently as I think I need to (sometimes daily or more often, sometimes every few days).

When my backup drive starts filling up, I replace it with a larger one, the former backup drive becomes a data drive, and one of the former data drives gets repurposed as an offsite backup with ZIPped copies of my data drives that I leave at my storage unit. I don't do the offsite backup very frequently, but it means that if something catastrophic happens, I won't lose everything.

For the incremental backups, I use Iomega Backup, which is no longer distributed, but I like it, because it stores files in uncompressed format that can be accessed normally in ordinary Windows directories without going through any kind of restore procedure and without using Iomega Backup itself. It can store several generations of updated files if needed and you can set the backup schedule to whatever is convenient (I run it automatically in the middle of the night). The usual reason that I need a backup is because a file has become corrupted, or maybe I want to recover some part of a file I deleted, and this seems to cover my needs.

I've had my share of hard disk crashes and such, but I don't think I've lost more than an hour's work since I started using computers for word processing in 1984 or so. Well, I guess there are a few files I wrote using Wordstar on the Xerox 3030 that are on 8" floppies, and it wouldn't be so easy to recover them today, but I haven't had any interest in doing so. I may even have printouts of some of those files, so if I had to, I'd probably check there first and scan them, if I needed them in digital format.

If you are using Mac OS, take a look at "Time Machine." It is very cool.

At first, it backs up the entire computer which, if you have a large hard drive, can take a long time. (A couple-few hours.) Then, after that, it makes hourly incremental backups. At the end of every day, it compresses the hourly backups into a single daily archive. At the end of every week, it compresses the daily backups into weekly archives. Finally, at the end of every month it creates monthly archives.

If, at any time, you need to look back at your archives, you can page through the different hourly, daily, weekly or monthly archives as if you are looking back in time. If you find a file, a group of files, or a folder of files that you want to restore you just highlight them and click the "Restore" button. In a few minutes your hard drive is back to its original state as you chose it to be.

It doesn't matter if you accidentally delete a file, if it is lost or becomes corrupt. You can delete your files on purpose or even restore your whole hard drive, system files and all.

The most you can ever lose is an hour's worth of work.

I am backing up two 1 TB drives onto a single 1 TB drive. I have everything backed up since last October when I started backing up with that drive and I am still only two thirds full on the backup drive.

Those hacks at Microsoft must have figured out a way to copy Time Machine by now.

I'm on a PC, but actually, that's the sort of program I don't really like. If I want to restore a file, I don't want to search for it by the time of the last backup. I want to look in an ordinary directory and find the file, and then I might want to look at various stored versions of it, and then copy it using the same method I would use to copy any file. In other words, I like the primary organization to be by filename with the same directory structure as the original files, and then by date, rather than the other way around.

So the way I have it now, my backup drive contains directories that mirror exactly the disks they are backing up, and within each backup set, there is a "revisions" directory" containing older versions of files that have been backed up more than once in different versions, also with the same structure as the original directory.

I can set my backup frequency to any interval I like, but I find it interferes with my work, if it runs continuously or very frequently, so I set it to daily and do a manual backup, when I think I need to backup more frequently.

I also don't want to have to use the backup software to do the restoration, because it is always a possibility if I have a hard drive crash that I might just upgrade the machine to a new OS that can't run the backup software I was using at the time. This probably isn't so much of an issue on a Mac, but on a PC, software going obsolete with the next version of Windows is increasingly a problem.

Imagine being able to go back and look at your computer the way it was at a chosen point in time. Choose a folder, choose a file or even choose your whole hard drive. Then click "Enter Time Machine" and select a time period you want to go back to. You will see your computer as it was on your chosen date.

Select a file, folder or group of files then click "Restore." The file is back right where it was. It is as natural to search for a file in the Time Machine as it is to search for it on your normal desktop.

If you don't like to use the graphical interface you can access the backup drive directly. You can search for files just like you always do. If you find the file you are looking for you can just copy it to a new location where you want it to be.

Files are not stored in a compressed format. The catalog structure is NOT in a proprietary format. All files are normally readable, normally searchable and normally copyable.

If you decide to stop using time machine, just go to your control panel and shut it off. You can turn it on or off as you wish. You can tell it to back up certain volumes or not. It backs up your machine hourly. It consolidates backups automatically. It does not delete any files. It only reorganizes the catalog.

I never used automated backups of any kind. I wanted to know what was being backed up and when. The problem was that I got lazy. I would not back up on a regular basis. I ended up with holes in my backups.

Time Machine is so seamless and so simple to use that I don't even have to think about it anymore.

IMHO Time Machine is the ultimate killer app. It is integrated seamlessly into OS X. If you invest into a HFS pre formatted external drive all you need to do is to connect it via FireWire 800 or USB to your machine. The Mac will only ask you if you want to use the drive as a backup and that's it. The rest just works and doesn't require any user input. If you want to, you can exclude any directory or even entire HD from the backup or just keep the default settings.

Time Machine doesn't interrupt your work or workflow, it's running completely in the background. If the Mac goes into standby it sends the connected drive(s) into standby as well. It works on single drives as well as on RAID drives. That's the advantage of a Mac: work, don't worry!

Iomega Backup and other backup programs I've seen for Windows run in the background, so theoretically you can keep doing what you're doing, but if you happen to be doing something that needs a lot of computer resources, running large file transfers in the background will noticeably slow things down.