how do you backup?

[cuestakid]

I am starting to consider my options for backing up my ripped TV shows, Movies and iTunes downloads (yes I know I can always redownload but who knows for how long). I have around 800GB (and growing), so online backups would have to be staggered and could take months.

For those who have libraries in the 2TB and more size, how do you do your off-site backups?

EDIT
let me add one thing-I have signed up for an online backup solution (crashplan), so I do have the ability to store it in the cloud, and I do have the ability to have them send a 1TB drive to me so I could dump as much as I can on that.

 

[Weaselboy]

Mountain Lion now supports multiple Time Machine backup sets. You might want to just buy a couple cheap external drives and rotate them keeping one attached and the other at work or a friends house. You can also encrypt a Time Machine backup so if your drive falls into enemy hands your data would be safe.

 

[murdoc158]

If you are just backing up things from iTunes, just use Crashplan. I have over 2TB I uploaded in just under the 30 day trial. I was in no hurry to backup since I could just redownload them again. No sense in paying upwards of $120+ to have them ship a hard drive if its not time sensitive. I gave Carbonite a shot as well but they have a bandwidth cap that kicks in after 2GB. My backup would have taken a few months.

 

[cuestakid]

I am leaning towards just sending it all to Crashplan-seems simplest and cheapest. However, I am on the fence with seeding-I rather not just leave my laptop on 24/7 for months on end.

 

[mic j]

You should also make sure you understand how your files are downloaded to you should you need to recover some or all of your library. Might want to search this forum on CrashPlan as this was discussed a while back.

 

[mslide]

The original disks are the backups (I don't buy shows/movies on iTunes). I take a very ghetto approach for redundancyin order to minimize the chance of having to re-rip something. I manually mirror things to my office PC. It's simple and works. I tend to only mirror things I know I'll watch again. If I had a really large collection, maybe something approaching 10TB, I'd build a server and run "unRAID".

Using online backup for tv/movies is silly. That's meant for documents, music, etc. You really want to spend a month or more uploading stuff and then days re-downloading it if a drive fails?

Offsite backup? Not necessary. It's only tv shows and movies. If my house burns down, I'll have a lot more important things to worry about than loosing a bunch of movies.