to schedule a backup properly

thetourist

i am about to invest in a usb or firewire drive to keep a backup of my onboard drives -- idealy i would like to leave it connected to the pc and set the pc to backup on a schedule; however i cant understand this .... one of the reasons i'm doing this is to protect myself in the event of data corruption like from a virus or hacker attack -- but if my pc gets a virus etc just before it is scheduled for a backup then surely if i dont notice that there has been a breach it will continue to backup the corrupted hard drive -- overwriting the previous clean disk image on the usb drive !! that way i would be left with two copies of a corrupted drive !!! --- am i right -- yet on the net i noticed that this issue seemed not to be addressed when people were describing scheduled backups
does anyone have any thoughts/corrections/solutions ??

bob

Kali

Regular system scans, theres no other way around it... plus bear in mind that if you have a virus-scanner enabled doing background checking it will pick up the virus when you copy the infected file.

silent

do what I do - use second copy http://www.centered.com/ to make backups to the drive once a week
I leave the drive hidden and disconnected due to two reasons - powersurge frying it and somebody stealing it with the pc. the pc can be replaced, data not

aaf

As an alternative, you might want to consider the following articles. Might solve your problem if you invest in mutiple storage media as opposed to all eggs in one basket. The Grandfather, Father, Son method is probably best

http://www.computer-repair.com/Backup.htm
http://www.seagate.com/products/tapesales/backup/A2g1.html
Hope this helps:(

Tenshot

I like to keep several days of backups, by doing each nightly backup to a separate directory; that way, if a problem becomes apparent, there are uncorrupted backups available to roll back to.

Not fool proof, but it doesn't hurt (and with hard disks so cheap these days, disk space isn't such a big issue).

thetourist

Originally posted by Kali
Regular system scans, theres no other way around it... plus bear in mind that if you have a virus-scanner enabled doing background checking it will pick up the virus when you copy the infected file.

yes i do regular system scans - and updates -
2 questions - does the scanner scan all file transferrs automaticaly and secondly what happens if it picks up on a virus -- presumably it would halt the backup -- in that case is the backup not half old and half new ( if the virus for the sake of argument was picked up half way through the transferr )
thanks

thetourist

Originally posted by Tenshot
I like to keep several days of backups, by doing each nightly backup to a separate directory; that way, if a problem becomes apparent, there are uncorrupted backups available to roll back to.

Not fool proof, but it doesn't hurt (and with hard disks so cheap these days, disk space isn't such a big issue).

i have a boot drive 15G and a storage drive 120G -- what size of a drive would you think i would need to keep my stuff backed up
i mean if my storage is at 95G and i need to backup 5G from the boot drive then to do like four seperate backups would that require a 400G drive ??? :rolleyes:
thanks

thetourist

thanks for the info people - i spent ages on the net searching for this stuff - boards.ie rocks