Back-ups

Tipp-Boy

Hi All,
I'm wondering what is the best way to back-up my PC.
Would you recommend buying a hard-drive and backing up data on this or perhaps using some data storage company?

Any opinions appreciated.

KoolKid

Not really a security issue. I'm guessing you are running windows, so I have moved the thread to there.

woolymammoth

it depends entirely on how much of what you want to back up. The best way is whichever one works for you!

Is it documents, music, movies, photos.. all of the above? Do you have a recovery partition on your PC or do you have recovery disks to reinstall the operating system if the entire system failed? If no, do you want to back up the entire hard disk?

There's plenty of options available. Storage is cheap, you can buy a USB hard disk and use windows backup with that. You can buy network attached storage and do the same. You can use any multitude of online backup services, some free up to a point, others for a monthly fee.

You can use tools like WinDirStat to figure out your storage requirements.

Capt'n Midnight

how long is a piece of string ?


what do you want to backup (how big are the files - or everything ?)
what is your budget (how important is the data to you )



Which OS do you have, the backup program in home versions of windows will backup files but won't backup windows itself

many external drives came with backup programs

online backups are generally limited to a few GB of storage unless you pay for them, and even then you will probably loose everything if they go bust. And you would need a great internet connection to backup a full system


to be fully secure you do need an off-site backup,
to backup and restore quickly you need a local backup

Fysh

I keep meaning to properly implement my planned backup policy at home, but the time involved in getting it set up means that I keep finding myself doing other things...

My plan is to configure each OS installation to have a smallish partition (20-40GB) which contains only the OS and installed software files, and a larger partition for storing both user account data and other file storage. Of course, this is difficult to do since un-fiddled-with Windows installation media doesn't let you place userdata on a different partition to the OS itself.

That being said, three comparatively-straightforward steps will let you work around it.

Step 1 is to take an image of your working OS installation, using DriveImage XML or something like it. DriveImage XML is free for personal usage; anyone with a Seagate or Maxtor drive installed in their system can use DiscWizard or MaxBlast for free, or if you fancy paying for the full version of either of those you can go for Acronis TrueImage.

This isn't a one-off job - you should be setting a schedule for taking subsequent OS partition images. The regularity of the schedule will depend on how often you make significant OS configuration changes and/or install additional software packages. Ideally you should never let your backup image get more than a few minor updates (be they OS or software patches) away from your current live install. Let's say monthly for a system on which you regularly install new software, or every 3 months otherwise.

Step 2 is to establish a routine for backing up your user account data. The directories you'll want to copy will depend on which versions of Windows you're using, but Local Settings (hidden) and Application Data from your user directory on XP, or the Appdata directory on Vista/7, are a good start, along with whatever document directories you've got. You could put together a script to automate the creation of a compressed copy of your user profile on a regular basis, or you could use Synctoy to do it.

Step 3 is to sort out a backup routine for your other data - films, music, etc. Ideally, you should have this on at least 2 drives - eg 1 internal and 1 external. I've got a couple of USB-SATA caddies, and my plan is to have one copy of all my data on the desktop (which has loads of internal storage), another copy on the 3.5" 1TB drive I use for transferring data between the desktop and the media centre machine, and a third copy taken once every 3-4 months to a third drive for insurance purposes. All told I'll be looking at around 3 copies of the data in total, at about 2TB or so per instance - but then, that's all of my music along with rips of all of my film and TV DVDs.

All I need now is the time to finish ripping the DVDs and actually follow the steps I've outlined above. Oh, and I'm probably short a couple of 1TB hard drives, but they're not all that expensive these days...

Random

fysh - and where do you keep the external backup hard drive?

Fysh

Random wrote: »

fysh - and where do you keep the external backup hard drive?

The notion is normally to keep it either by the front door or somewhere away from your main living area so that if the house goes up in flames you don't lose everything.

In my case, I'll probably have one copy of all the data in the desktop, another on the drives in use with the media centre, and the insurance copy on a drive locked in my desk at work. Unlikely I'll ever need them, but better safe than sorry (once I get around to implementing it, that is).