What is the best way to backup large computer files?

It’ll take you forever to back up 5 TB to just about anything. For long term backup of less than a GB, CDs are great. For backing up multiple GB, nothing beats thumbdrives. But if you haven’t been backing up all along, backup up 5 TB all at once is going to be a herculean (and expensive) task.

There have been tape backup devices on the market off and on over the years that have the speed and capacity you need, but these have always proved to be unreliable for long term storage (remember the JAZ “click of death” debacle?).

IMO, your best bet for now is to buy two or three 2 to 3 TB external USB hard drives and let your computer back up to them over a couple of nights. And then store them in a media safe.

Sorry, I should have explained. I currently use a combination of external and internal drives to backup. I use the PureSync software which is excellent for backing up large files on a regular basis that haven’t changed. It just copies any new files that have been added and does this very quickly. My question related more the hardware side. Like I said, I have heard of large network backup units, but is copying over a network cable going to be as fast as using USB3? And can I get a large external device, say 8–12 GB using USB3?

USB3 can theoretically reach over 600 MB/s.

LAN speeds are either 100 MB/s for Cat5, or 1000 MB/s for Cat6 (but everything in your LAN needs to rated at Cat 6 for you to get that throughput…router cables, all PCs, etc.).

I’ve heard that you can squeeze 1000 MB/s from Cat5, so someone will no doubt come along and say I’m posting incorrect information, but I’m doubtful of that.

So if you have Cat 6 throughout your network, LAN is faster than USB3.

If not, then USB3 is faster (and you don’t need everything to be USB3 to get the USB3 speeds between your PC and your backup device, just the path between your PC and backup device needs to be USB3).

My gut tells me that the cheapest way out is with an old PC that is repurposed as a NAS. Slap a few big hard drives in, set them up in a RAID, and go from there. Dedicated storage devices with those capacities get expensive quick.

Also note that your drives will likely be the bottleneck here; it doesn’t matter how fast a connection you use between systems if the drives can’t support that speed. Accordingly, I see that big a transfer taking a while no matter what.