How are you backing up your hard drive?

Pluggable external drive: no need to keep in in the house once you have copied it. All good commercial businesses store their backups away from site. Leave it at your mum’s or your sister’s. You won’t need it quickly if the firemen are busy trying to douse the flames.

Backups? Hah. Backups are for pessimists… :slight_smile:

Phil

:stuck_out_tongue:

I back up my hard drive with hard copies and my brain. There isn’t any data that I create or store that I couldn’t recreate/reinstall/download if I really needed it. Besides, I’ve only ever had one hard drive crash on me in the 10 years I’ve had my own PC, and computer hardware usually becomes obsolete before it breaks as evidenced by the old PC parts I end up purging every few years.

Keep in mind that a “Q’n’D” backup may not be any better than no backup at all. If you’re going through the trouble of backing anything up, put a bit of money / effort into the backup. That is, don’t just go and buy the cheapest backup media you can find. If it comes time to restore your system and your backup media has failed / is difficult to retrieve / restore, you aren’t much better off than not having backed up at all.

Another tip: a bit of organization will make backups a snap. Keep your “important” files in a separate location (be it a folder or a virtual drive) so that you know what needs to be backed up and what you can easily reinstall.

everything burns in a house fire
If you want to get serious, buy a fireproof safe… and drop that extra drive in it.
Or keep it off-site.

Fireproof safes are good to certain temperatures.
So, be sure to read specifications.

I have no idea how hot your standard house fire gets.

I’d insure all those uni’s.
You cant insure a computers configuration.

A friend of mine suggested this as a method of transfering info to the new external drive:

“Copying the C: drive is a Copy and Paste procedure using Explorer-- when you plug in the external hard drive (Plug and Pray) if all goes to plan then the drive should look like any other drive, just with a newer, higher letter, like “E:” depending on your current existing partitions. Open your C: drive in Explorer, do a Ctrl+A to select ALL the folders, Ctrl+C to copy the whole thing, then go to that new hard drive (still in Explorer) and Ctrl+V paste it over. The only problem you might have is copying over the Windows system folder, there may be “files in use” errors, which halts the ENTIRE process (stupid design, imho)”

It seems simple and therefore attractive to me.

Read the last sentence… note the word “halts”. That happens even outside the windows system depending on if you have anything open, but usually it’s system files or program files this happens with. However, like it says, it halts the process, making it almost impossible to get everything backed up. In windows there is a backup utility and you could use that to make an image of a drive, including the system, I think.

So would you recommend that Windows back up utility function as opposed to the one described above then?

It’d probably give you a better backup in case of HD failure… though, I’d still recommend a daily rsync snapshot to a remote loaction. :wink:

'K, thanks for the advice.

The Windows backup utility is much much better than just dragging files from your C drive to the external hard drive. The Windows backup utility will do a good functional backup of files. However, the Windows backup utility does not backup your Windows configuration and other settings. It only backs up files and is best used to backup data files. If you ever have to do a full restore you’ll need to first install Windows again, get Windows configured the way you like it, install your applications again, then restore the data files from your backup.

Just dragging the files to your external drive is very very quick 'n dirty and not very reliable. It is hard to be sure that the files actually all got copied over. Very unreliable and hard to manage.

Best personal backup option is to do an image of the drive and store the image file on your external drive

Second best is to use Windows Backup to backup your data files to your external drive

Third best is to ZIP individual directories and copy the ZIP files to your external drive

99th best is to drag and drop all the files on the drive to your external drive

On the subject of backups, here’s an oldie: The great bit bucket in the sky

Don’t think you’ll always be the lucky one and never have it happen to you.

well, if you’ve got the money, just getting a second comp wouldn’t be a bad idea

Don’t worry about backing up Windows, just backup your important docs/photos/vids/saved games. Windows can be reinstalled, essays are harder to retype from memory, and recreating photos sucks too :wink:

Thanks for your suggestions guys and especially for clarifying things John.

I plan to get a 160 MB drive at my preferred computer shop in the next week or so and then kick things off with the Windows Backup Utility. And then I’ll take it from there…