hi, On 27/09/09 23:40, M. Hamzah Khan wrote: > The only other option I could think of is to use tapes, but this option > can be quite pricy for a home user. With the cost of nearline, online media reducing all the time - tapes is bit of a black hole these days. Just think about what you want to backup against, make a list - that gives you something to tick off against. And then workout something that is cost effective and reasonable. > So I was wondering what you guys use for external backups for a home > system containing at least 500GB worth of important data? My home network is 1 media pc, 4 desktop machines and two laptops. Of all of these, only 1 machine is really on 24/7 - thats the home server, if you will. Its also the only machine to have significant storage at 6x500GB disks. The others just have enough to get the OS going and some app space. My main 'backup' is that those disks are organised into a raid-10, and I have a usb hosted 750GB drive for things that I want to take offline. All the disks are spread out over different batch numbers and I've tried to mix seagate and western digital disks. Having lost many disks over the years, I've not lost any data as yet. ( prolly tempting fate here, I guess all the disks are now going to implode at 5am tomorrow morning! ) rsync is the only 'app' that I use for backups at home. - KB