What do you back up on your external hard drives?

hello932

Ive got a lot of films on my pc that im never going to watch ever again. Should i bother backing up on principle or should i just delete them forever?

ricman

Back up stuff thats important to you, like pictures, music ,cv, art etc or student project work ie stuff that is financially valuable to you, eg a test if you lost those movies would you care or be irritated ,or is it like stuff you record on dvr that you may never watch. theres no law that says backup everything, i backup all my pc driver files cos it saves time if and when i need to reinstall windows .I use drivermax program to export em to a folder, my drivers.SOME people rip their cds cos cds can get scratched and stop playing.

BlandKitten

Personally, I back up my pictures, music, films, shows, iso's, coursework... I back up more or less everything. If you have an external with enough space, then why not?

Random

again though, where do you keep your backup hard drive?

softdancomputer

Random wrote: »

again though, where do you keep your backup hard drive?

...and do you backup your backup?

JDxtra

Backing up the irreplaceable data should take priority (personal work, photos, home movies etc). I do backup my music, but that’s because I spent so much time ripping it from my own CDs. I also backup my software install files and licence keys. I don’t bother with any media files I can easily download again. Finally, I have a snapshot of my OS to save time should I need to get up running again quickly after a disaster.

Random wrote: »

again though, where do you keep your backup hard drive?

Off site of course! I keep my main backup in work (a portable USB hard drive) and only bring it home once per month. I also do another backup to an internal hard drive that should protect any new files from a hard drive failure between my main backup cycles.

Probably overkill for most. It all depends on your individual requirements and the importance of the data to you. I find my setup easy to manage using software such as Acronis.

CompExpert

I back up :
Linux Distribution
Programs and Drivers
E-books
Audio books
Documents and serial codes of programs/games

I have an 1tb external hd and its in 95% full but this stuff i need for my work and for fixing computers.

ricman

IF you have a valuable program on cd or dvd eg photoshop ,that you paid for its worth backing up the disk, while still holding on to the original cds.

CaSCaDe711

No matter how much data you have, be it purchased, ripped, downloaded, created, cloned etc, whatever you do, consider backing up family photos and vids to CDRs / DVDs. All well and good having those stored and organised conveniently on an external drive, but those drives can also fail.

ricman

You should burn photos,important data to cdr or dvdr ,at some point the
backup hd will stop working.

Diddy Kong

ricman wrote: »

You should burn photos,important data to cdr or dvdr ,at some point the
backup hd will stop working.

+1 for the back up to external media like this. But remember like external drives you still need to handle the CD/DVD with care and proper storage as they can still die.

For standard software, games and movies, external drives are fine, but for the likes of family photos or important documents I would suggest some online storage.

John C

I back up the following to an USB Drive. It has four partitions.
DataSync, FotoVideo, Download and BAK.
- weekly my own documents, photos and tables for that week with SyncToy .
- monthly differential backup operating system.
- downloaded files
Docs and Fotos are regularly stored onto DVD.

You ask about deleting old films. My thinking is to
send them to Data Narvana. If I haven't watched a clip
in six months it's time to part.