I've just got hold of a program called "Allway Sync".
It synchronises files between different folders or even completely different hard drives.
My western digital hard dive used for editing gets mirrored/sync'd to seperate external drive.
Everey hour the allway sync program looks for anything which has been added or deleted from the WD drive, any differences are then applied to the other (target) drive.

The good thing about this is that i also only have to offload footage from my sdhc cards once, onto my WD drive, the footage will now automatically get copied to the target drive.
So apart from the safety aspect, it's also sped up my workflow.

You can have as many drives sync'd as you want, i've actually got 2 external drives being sync'd to the target (3rd) drive, with a 1 way sync, ie the sync only goes FROM the destination drive(s) TO the target drive. 2 way sync is possible though.

Here's the link if anyones interested, best of all the program is free !.

Allway Sync: Free File Synchronization, Backup, Data Replication, PC Sync Software, Freeware, File Sync, Data Synchronization Software


Paul.

Not to knock the Drobo or other NAS solutions, but for anyone thinking of backing up to hard drive I would recommend that you take a look at building or buying a Windows Home Server. The WHS has a very advanced storage system that avoids storing any file twice. Each time you back up your PC it checks to see if it already has a copy of each file, or a version of the file (it does this at the cluster level). If so, it makes a record of this, but doesn't store another copy of the file (or part of the file). You can do automatic backups of your primary machine (including your EDLs) on any schedule that you want. You can fully restore a crashed or corrupted machine to any backup date.

Of course, I keep my video files outside of my system backups... but I store these to a video folder on the WHS that is designated to be kept on at least 2 drives. If a hard drive fails, I haven't lost any files... I simply replace it, and the system is back to having redundant copies of all of my important files.

It's infinitely expandable, and you get the protection of RAID without the complexity.

You can buy a large full tower enclosure, a fairly cheap low-power AMD X2 processor, and start with a couple of 1 TB drives for under $600, including the OS.

I know this applies to many types of backup but what happens to your windows home server if the power supply fails and passes an over voltage to your raid array, mother board and everything else? You end up with a completely dead backup. One of the advantages of tape backups, BD or DVD is that a hardware failure is unlikely to lead to the loss of any data. I'm not sure I want to use a backup system that consumes half a kilowatt of power, not very green. I have a small linux server running on a box called an NSUL2 from Linksys. It only draws about 30 watts and you can hang a couple of USB drives off it (or more if you add a hub). I have a coupe of 500Gb drives on it and use the drives as a pair of backups. Once they are full I replace them with a couple more. The drives are independently powered so failure of both together while not impossible is unlikely. It's not the fastest device in the world but works fine as a network based backup device. If I need to edit from my backups I just unplug the drive from the NSUL2 and plug it in to the computer directly. All my important material is still being burnt to DL-DVD or BD.

For those Mac users out there is something similar I use all the time called Chronosync. It isn't free but is pretty inexpensive. You can run various schedules to sync up drives or folders at any time. It has lots of feature including email notification and data verification. It can sync bi-directionally as well. It can also make a type of 'incremental backup' if it finds that something has been deleted on the 'from' folder, it won't necessarily delete those items but can put it into a 'archive' folder on the destination so you can double check that you really want to delete them.

I have various schedules. I download EX1 (and other flash based footage) to folder on a fast RAID and then have that folder sync'd in the middle of the night.

Roxio Toast 8 came with a free backup program called Deja Vu. It worked great. You could schedule backups any time you wanted, etc.... But when Leopard/Time Machine came out, we stopped using it. I would highly recommend it though. Easy to use.

Good points Alister. Offline backups are the only truly redundant form of backup to "online" data. Of course, really good surge suppression is always a good idea for any critical PC or server. I'm not talking about cheap power strips with surge suppressors... I'm talking about good multi-level surge suppressors (with gas discharge tubes, heavy MOVs, low-pass filters, etc.).

I wouldn't want to use half a kilowatt of power either. I built my home server from a 45 watt (Total Design Power) chip, and I use a very green power supply (300 watt capacity). I'm not sure of the standby power draw, but it's very low (maybe 50 watts?). It's so quiet I can't tell if it is on or not unless I check for the blue light. I don't keep it on all the time ... it takes less than a minute to boot up. I press the power button and it safely shuts down.

I like the Windows Home Server for many reasons, but mainly for the flexibility and the expandability. I think it is an ideal solution for video editors to store multiple terabytes of data reliably while keeping the files "online" for quick access later. I'm sure you can probably do many of the same things with Linux, if you have the time and the skill set. The Windows Home Server is dead simple to set up, connect to and maintain. You can add or remove hard drives whenever you want (it's not RAID... but it stores files redundantly). So later, if I want to remove a 500 GB drive and replace it with a 1.5 TB drive I just tell the server that I want to remove the 500 GB drive, it tells me when it is safe to do it, I add the 1.5 TB drive, and it adds it to the server's storage array.

Tom