What program is a good solution for daily automated backups of your AV drives? I have a RAID array of 2 TBs worth of video files on my computer that are critical. I need to figure out a backup sollution that is daily and does not impact the performance of the PC during daily editing. Any one recommended a good program for this?

What is your destination? What are you backing up your 2TB of video files on HDD to? What kind of device is it? Tape drive? Another 2TB of HDD (mirroring)? To DVD writer?

Before I can recommend any program - you need to tell me the answer to the above.

Lastly, are you running PC or Mac?

From Hard drive to Another set of probably Two, 1000g drives - external.
Which are not RAIDed.
Perhaps connected over Network cable (cat 5) or USB.

Something that would let me do this backup over night - automated so all i got to do is remember to leave the computer on.

Running on PC.

Okay - questions first :-).

a) Can your present PC see your external drives attached via CAT5e Ethernet as a drive letter?

b) Attaching it via USB 2 or Firewire will be a better bet here - because Windows will recognise the hard-drive and assign it a drive letter.

c) You said your present HDDs are 2TB. Your external drives are 1TB each ... so if one external drive is full ... then what? Do you know how to use Windows
"Computer Management" to assign one drive letter to cover two physical drives? As a software striped HDD across two physical drives?

As for backup software - the most efficient I have personally used (and is still using today) is CA's Retrospect Backup.

You do a full backup first time ... then subsequently, the software will only backup those data files that are changed.

As for automated backup - you can schedule the backup at whatever time you want - via the software's automate tab.

a) Yes, my current drive can see a Network Hardrive we currently have as a drive letter. However,
B) I agree, USB2 would be easier than Firewire probably.

c) My projects themselves are never going to be larger than a TB but i might at most fill up a 2TB array with multiple projects coming in at 1.4TB or so.
The array is made up of 4 disks for speed more than capacity. I do uncompressed HD capture for compositing and usually like to keep my RAID as clean as possible so it stays faster. -As The more data filling the RAID volume means it slows down performace.

I dont know if there is software that allows you to backup on a project folder by folder basis and do an automated Synchronization between two folders but if i could do THAT, that would solve the problem.

Then i would have two identical copies of the project folder, including all assets in two phisical locations, instead of a copy of the entire drive itself in two phisical locations. I dont know much about backup software but wondering if anyone knows if there is a program out there that does this for me?

Thanks!

So - you need a synchronisation software in that case - not a backup software. I have not personally used any of them - I use Retrospect - but it is a backup software. Perhaps some other members will help you here. Or you can try Google search for one?