I have been thinking about backup for obvious reasons. In an ideal world, I would prefer to back up to nonvolatile, disposable media such as tape or discs, but the fragility and slowness of tape and the relatively small capacity of discs makes these choices currently untenable. Like others, I’m afraid I have concluded that hard drives are the only solution for home backup at the current time.

With that in mind, I conducted a pricing study, using recently completed eBay auctions as the basis. I did not account for shipping, speed or other product details, crunching only the raw closing price. The URLs in the table will not provide the same data I employed, but rather the current set for the searches I employed. The column labeled ‘Average price’ contains exactly that, a simple average calculated against the first page of results returned from ebay.

Here are the results:

This table corroborates the data seen above. The most economical choice for obtaining backup drives is the 200gb class.

It should be noted that the average sale price reported for the 200gb product class is actually higher than the $89.95 price offered by at least one merchant using the eBay ‘buy it now’ option.

In conclusion, these are bare drives intended for either internal mounting or for mounting into a separately-purchased case, which will run under $50. I have heard of folks swapping their backup hard-drives like tapes, but I believe that this is an impractical option. I don’t have a budget developed for this yet, as I need to tally what I have to address in terms of data. However, I think that an additional 400gb should provide me with sufficient storage space to implement a scheduled full backup and subsequent incremental backups on a weekly /daily schedule.