Reduce the size of my BackUp folder

[NY Jester]

I run backups on my machine weekly and save i to a 300GB external drive. The problem is, there is now less than 50GB left. Is there a way I can reduce the size of my backups - or compress the existing backups - delete them all together?

Thanks in advance.

[Mr Spock]

Is it a total back-up or incremental back-up? Do you need 300G of back-ups?

[Damian]

Originally Posted by NY Jester

I run backups on my machine weekly and save i to a 300GB external drive. The problem is, there is now less than 50GB left. Is there a way I can reduce the size of my backups - or compress the existing backups - delete them all together?

Thanks in advance.

Hard drives are so so very cheap now, surely, just buy another one?

You can get 1TB drives for about 70 bucks.

[Wazza]

I roll them over - FIFO - keep 5 and delete the eldest whenever I do a new one

[Allfetish]

Originally Posted by Wazza

I roll them over - FIFO - keep 5 and delete the eldest whenever I do a new one

Bingo. Or even better IMHO:

1. Yesterday. (most recent nightly)
2. Day before yesterday. (old nightly)
3. Last week. (nightly from seven days ago)
4. Last month. (recent nightly from the 1st of the month)

Optional:

5. Month before last. (Two months ago)
6. Three days ago.

These will more than take care of most situations! 90% of the time you'll just want the most recent nightly backup anyway.

[Cleo]

It's too bad you are a Mac user, TimeMachine.

[bDok]

Get a bigger hard drive.

I'm using time machine with a 500gb and it's full. It cycle the old out with the new in the time line of things. I want more though.

[NY Jester]

bDok - that reminds me of Jaws : "I think we're gonna need a bigger boat..."



Yeah I just wanted to make sure I could delete the oldest ones nd leave the more recent ones without having an issue. Thanks for the feedback everyone.

[flip.green]

If you end up throwing more money at the problem i suggest a hard drive dock something like this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817392022
This way you can just pop in a new drive anytime

[bluebrit]

We are going with carbonite.com
$129 gets you three years peace of mind

[Itchy]

Originally Posted by flip.green

If you end up throwing more money at the problem i suggest a hard drive dock something like this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817392022
This way you can just pop in a new drive anytime

That looks pretty cool I might have to grab one !

Found this funny though

2. The power cable that goes from the A/C adapter to the wall has thin shielding. (one of my small dogs 7-12 lbs) chewed it up within a couple seconds exposing the copper wire. I unknowingly stepped on this copper wire after I turned on the unit and received a small shock and burnt a hole through my sock.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by bluebrit

We are going with carbonite.com
$129 gets you three years peace of mind

Kind of like how I feel about cloud servers...while one average person's computer may not be worth assembling a dedicated hacker team to crack, once you have thousands or millions of people storing their most sensitive data in one location it gets a lot more attractive as a target. I know there will all kinds of safeguards in place, but nothing is really 100% secure if you can dedicate enough resources to the problem. And that's without considering gaining access via disgruntled employees and other social engineering tactics.

Sleep well.

[Cleo]

Originally Posted by bluebrit

We are going with carbonite.com
$129 gets you three years peace of mind

I just want to know how well that works with the terabytes of data that I have. I guess you would spend about a month doing a full restore not to mention a few months doing the first backup.

Even with my fast N network I still take my drives off of the Airport and plug them into a Firewire port for doing a large restore or the initial backup.

[tickler]

Originally Posted by flip.green

If you end up throwing more money at the problem i suggest a hard drive dock something like this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817392022
This way you can just pop in a new drive anytime

Yeah, I've been using slide out HD trays for years. I'm always grabbing +500mB of sample data from one of my clients to take home for analysis or testing.

It's much easier to just pop into the office & grab the data to take home, then spening weeks at their office(out-of-town), or trying to play with through the VPN.

[Cleo]

Originally Posted by tickler

Yeah, I've been using slide out HD trays for years.

I like this one. Cost a little more but has Firewire too.

I keep one of these around for quickly being able to mount just about any bare drive.

[MeatPounder]

LOL, Cleo do you still have about a dozen usb drives taped together?

[Cleo]

Originally Posted by MeatPounder

LOL, Cleo do you still have about a dozen usb drives taped together?

Actually they are Firewire drives that are RAIDed for FoxyAngel. Some have been replaced with 1 TB MyBook Firewire drives stuck together with two sided tape that have also been RAIDed but probably the next time she needs one we will get one of these MyBook RAIDs.

[MeatPounder]

That mybook is exactly what I have connected to the server for all our client computer backups here at the office (well actually I have the 2 Tb model with 1Tb drives in a raid)

[Cleo]

Yeah the MyBook drives are great... and cheap too.



It wasn't that long ago that a 250 gig drive was big, noisy and expensive. That is how we ended up with a bunch of them duct taped together forming, what at the time was, inexpensive RAIDs.

[MeatPounder]

lol, that is the set up I was talking about

[flip.green]

Cleo looking at your pix with all those cables and wires makes me feel sane, everyone complains about the rats nest of cabling i keep but i keep telling them its normal