Ok you geeks out there, what method are you using to back up your hard drive?
I have a 40 GB hard drive that is now about half full. I have been backing up my documents and some settings to CD-RW’s for a while now. But that leaves my photo collection of 540 MB’s, and my itunes program of 10 GB’s, out of the back up. I am thinking of getting an external hard drive to do a more thorough back up. Does that sound like a good idea? Are there other more efficient options? And should I be backing up the entire C drive some time soon?
I’d be interested in your thoughts and suggestions on this topic.
second hard drive just as big… or do a backup on your mp3 player… or a big external hard drive… and compaq gives you the option of making a backup cd as well… so yea… or if ur smart… just run linux u wont have to worry bout that…
yeah get another hard drive. 40G is also very small, get another HD AND get linux. you cant have a lot of vital stuff if half of your stuff is music and the other half takes up 10G but yeah get both linux and a new HD.
I agree with the second HDD. I have my C:\ which is 40GB and an E:\ which is 60GB. I have all my videos and music on the E: drive and I back the entire C: drive to it. I have two DVD burners (D:\ and F:) just so I can do drive to drive copies. One of them is a slow dual layer with which I could back up the entire contents of my C: drive on one disk if I wanted. But HDD’s are HUGE and cheap. Get another internal drive when you find a big one on sale. My next computer purchase will be a 160GB+ internal drive to replace the E:\ drive.
I make images of my entire C drive and then burn the image file to DVD.
Image files are the best if you ever have to do a full restore. If you have to do a full restore you just have the image program reload that image to the HD. Windows and all your settings will be exactly as they were on the day you imaged the drive (everything else will be lost though). A good disk image program will also allow you to browse the image file and extract single files from it if you ever need to just restore a few files that got accidentally erased or somehow got corrupted.
I also do images of my data drive.
An image file is a picture of your drive, sector by sector. It copies sectors that are in use rather than copying files. You end up with a file that is an image (mirror image) of your drive.
If you are running Windows XP a good free disk image program is DriveImage XML along with a BartPE boot disk that has DriveImage XML on it. The BartPE boot disk will allow you to restore your system image without first needing to install Windows just to be able to run DriveImage XML. Otherwise you’re left with a chicken and egg problem where you can’t restore your system image because Windows is all borked.
So the combination of DriveImage XML and a BartPE boot disk with DriveImage XML on it will cover you for all situations.
However, in order to do the imaging you’re going to need a D drive or some other drive to copy the image file to before it gets burned to a DVD. You can’t store the image file on the drive that is being imaged. Some disk imaging programs allow you to create the image file directly to a DVD or CD-R, but DriveImage XML does not have that feature. So you have to have empty space on another drive to store the image file. You can also use an external USB or Firewire drive to store the image file.
The image file can get about 2:1 compression. So if you have 20 GB in use on your C drive the image file will be about 10 GB. The compression ratio will be less if you have lots of non-compressible files like MP3s, video files, and JPGs.
I routinely back up my photos, I have something like 3 gigs of photos, most of which I took myself (I’ve taken over 6000 pics with my current camera alone, a few hundred on the previous camera, and a few hundred on my gf’s:) MP3’s aren’t as important, most of mine are legal copies of discs I own.
Another hard drive? Come on guys… what happens if your house burns down… what then? Both hard drives are toast then… that’s what. Can you deal with that and losing 29 of your families unicycles?
Thanks for the info guys. I really appreciate you sharing your computer knowledge.
I am leaning toward the external harddrive idea. And are there other equally good options to a backup program to do this transfer besides Norton Ghost?
If you’re feeling super-into getting a really secure/safe backup, and have a safe, consider getting a external harddrive with Ethernet networking built in. Run ethernet into your safe, and bam - safe backup.
This assumes a safe, which yeah I realise most people don’t have. But it’s worth considering.
You could use CygWin + Rsync to back up, if you don’t mind “getting your hands dirty” to make things function.
To be brutally honest, I just want a quick and dirty kind of back up process. Nothing deadly safe, just fairly ok and better than the ‘almost no back up at all’ option I am using up till now. And no I don’t want the ‘getting my hands dirty option’ if I can help it. Geeking isn’t my most favourite of all pastimes…
Ah yep, then the USB Harddrive solution sounds pefect. Make sure to ignore anyone who suggested a MP3 player as your backup solution, though, for a couple of reasons:
Theft
MP3 players get stolen
Harddrive Failiure
I’ve seen many an iPod with stuffed harddrives, some from within ‘normal use’
Quick and dirty? and a canned solution? Maybe a mirra: http://mirra.com
A real solution? Get a network drive somewhere not in your home, located remotely, and use rsync:
rsync -a --delete --link-dest=/backup.YESTERDAY source_HD/ username@remote.location:/backup.TODAY/
Replace YESERDAY with yesterday’s date, source_HD with the location of the files to be backed up, and username@remote.location:/backup.TODAY/ with the username, host and location to make today’s backup. This will give you daily snapshots without taking up much more space.
DriveImage XML combined with BartPE will do that for free. Making a BartPE disk is slightly geeky, but mostly point and click. It’s easy. You’ll have to copy one file to add DriveImage XML to the BartPE directory to add DriveImage XML to BartPE, but the rest is point and click.
Using DriveImage XML is very straight forward. The real neat bit is that it can do a live snapshot while Windows is running. No need to reboot like you have to with Ghost. With an external harddrive it will be an easy backup.
I would disagree with that. If you use Ghost or similar to back it up, you create a copy of the entire drive, including the system software. Recover is just a matter of removing the broken master drive and replacing it with the cloned coy drive. Easy. Just remember to ghost it fairly often. Coupled with a frequent CD copy of any recent important data, you can be very safe very simply.
