Backing up 1 terrabyte

So how do you back up 1 terrabyte of data. On our home machine I have 4 hard drives that give me a little more than 1 terrabyte of data. We have tons of music, movies, applications, pictures, documents and everything else you can think of storing on a pc. Well a couple of weeks ago, we lost it all. We had a hard drive crash (40 gig) that held our Operating System and all the installed programs we had. Somehow in the process of trying to reinstall Windows, I lost all the data on the 40 gig and a 250gig hard drive that held all our applications, documents and pictures.

I initially thought that was all we lost. Luckily (if you can call it luck) we had some backups, about 10 dvds) that held most of it. We did lost a lot but not all. So I went through the process of transferring everything from the DVD's to our hard drive. I still had my other two SATA drives to get up and running. It seems during the move, I lost the driver install cd's for my motherboard. This wasn't a huge issue but I didn't have the drivers for the raid card which controlled the sata connectors. So I kept putting it off till I had time to try to find the disk or the drivers. Tonight I figured I would get it done. I went to the controller website and got the drivers, installed them and tried to get the hard drives to work. Well, they didn't. Windows kept asking me to format them. I was not happy at all.

I was headed to church so I thought I would take the drives there and see if I could get the data off with our new pc's. That didn't work either. It hit me. I lost over 500 gigs of music and movies. All the backup's I had for my dvd's. I also realized I would spend the next 3-6 weeks re-ripping all our music back to the hard drive. I have emailed Apple to see if (by the grace of God) they would let me redownload all the music I have purchased from them. Otherwise I have lost a lot of money...

Live and learn I guess. Next weekend I will spend a bunch of time burning my stuff to new dvds in case this happens again. I am also looking to buy an external hard drive to store our data so we don't have this issue again.

Rules to live by... always backup your data, no matter how much you have. The extra time you spend can save you a lot of time and money...