Until they offer us a cheap 20TB pen drive, I certainly won't be able to do this. I use a number of LAN-shared resources, all of which have to be backed up in full (I've had extremely disappointing results with "incremental" backup) every day. What I've learned is that if you use a backup medium that is visible to the OS as a mass storage device, you might as well not bother. The way in which Windows has been designed, if there's a virus, for example, running on your computer, your backup will be infected within 100 ms of its power-on. Consequently, the only reasonable and safe backup is one that's produced via some process that doesn't allow the OS to see the backup medium as a file. Tape drives once were in this class, but they've seemingly fallen out of favor, probably because of cost. The advantage with them was that the only way to "talk" to the tape was through a device-and-process-specific driver, normally wholly contained within the application that performed the backup.

Until there's a reasonable way to do sound backups under Windows, it will always be necessary to take extreme measures to protect one's data. If Microsoft continues along its current path, however, our data will always continue to be less secure, as they seem determined to make every computer accessible to whoever wants to access/damage/infect/steal it.

RE