How often do you back up and what do you use?

[DeAnna]

I just ordered a SeaGate 60MB external hard drive and was wondering what's the most efficient way to get into a back up routine. I have been only backing up My Docs and Quicken to a DVD but need something more complete in case my comp crashes (god forbid!).

My Dell desktop says it still have 26GB of free space on my C drive but it loads and shuts down very slowly.

What do yu'all use?

 

[abomb]

I have an external hard drive and just copy over stuff in Windows a couple time a year.

I backup my thumbdrive once or month or so, as it contains most of my data that changes.

 

[Brian in Mesa]

SeaGate 60MB external hard drive

Holy cow - a 60MB external hard drive. LOL

Just teasing you. I figure you meant to say a 60GB.

Why so small?

You can get a 500GB for $89.00 at many places. Pretty soon the 1TB externals will drop in price too. Saw one for about $179.00 in an ad.

 

[DeAnna]

Holy cow - a 60MB external hard drive. LOL

Just teasing you. I figure you meant to say a 60GB.

Why so small?

You can get a 500GB for $89.00 at many places. Pretty soon the 1TB externals will drop in price too. Saw one for about $179.00 in an ad.

Yep, it's 60GB. Is that considered small? My desktop has 32GB so that's about double my entire PC. I don't keep any large files on it such as music nor videos.

Should I just copy the entire C drive over to the external hd? Will that be useable to boot up in case it crashes?

 

[Sandan]

Every night.

Have a Samba server mounted and backup to to a device on that. Is built on old PC running linux

 

[Sandan]

I use windows backup utility on XP

 

[Chaz]

Yep, it's 60GB. Is that considered small? My desktop has 32GB so that's about double my entire PC. I don't keep any large files on it such as music nor videos.

Should I just copy the entire C drive over to the external hd? Will that be useable to boot up in case it crashes?

There is file backup, programs that just backup all the files. With this type you still have to reload windows, reinstall your programs, and then move the desired files back where they belong.

What you may want is a image backup program like Norton Ghost or Acronis true image. These make an image of the entire disk. They also have a recovery disk (a CD) that you can boot from and restore the entire disk image, Windows and all from the backup onto a new hard drive.

I would recommend you backup at least once a month but once a week is better. It is all about how sensitive you are to loss. For some being set back a week is no big deal but for others they may be creating documents all the time and want continuous instant backup every few minutes so they never loose anything.

You can also do a combination of the above, maybe do an image backup once a month and do a file backup of your important files every day.

 

[Sandan]

I've been looking into Google docs as well, that changes the backup picture some.

Already switch to gmail for everything, personal and business.

Once GDocs goes live it could sure make windows reinstalls easier

 

[DeAnna]

There is file backup, programs that just backup all the files. With this type you still have to reload windows, reinstall your programs, and then move the desired files back where they belong.

What you may want is a image backup program like Norton Ghost or Acronis true image. These make an image of the entire disk. They also have a recovery disk (a CD) that you can boot from and restore the entire disk image, Windows and all from the backup onto a new hard drive.

I would recommend you backup at least once a month but once a week is better. It is all about how sensitive you are to loss. For some being set back a week is no big deal but for others they may be creating documents all the time and want continuous instant backup every few minutes so they never loose anything.

You can also do a combination of the above, maybe do an image backup once a month and do a file backup of your important files every day.

True Image sounds like what I'm looking for (I try to avoid anything from Norton - wreaks havoc on my system!).

 

[DeAnna]

Once GDocs goes live it could sure make windows reinstalls easier

Do you have the link for this? Thanks!

 

[Sandan]

Ghost is pretty an industry standard utility

 

[Chaz]

Ghost is pretty an industry standard utility

The current Norton Ghost is basically Drive Image which they got when they acquired PowerQuest.

The old Ghost is Symantec Ghost Suite and is used more for industry cloning and deployments.


Deanna, Norton products are resource hogs. I have used both programs and I can recommend the Acronis program. Plus the Acronis program is cheaper.

 

[Sandan]

The old Ghost is Symantec Ghost Suite and is used more for industry cloning and deployments.

Ah that is the Ghost I'm familiar with

 

[DeAnna]

Well that was a semi-nightmare. I tried the Windows utility for back up but it won't work (some kind of error message).

I didn't have the $$ to buy Acronis, so I tried Windows Sync Toy 2.0 to copy my entire C drive. Took a total of 5 hours!! I kid you not! or maybe I did something wrong?

Didn't help that my CPU only has 1 usb port in front (as opposed to the 2 that came with the external hard drive and should've been faster).

So now I'm on a quest to either get a new CPU (cheapo) or go thru the headache of adding more RAM and then re-formatting my entire hard drive and do a clean install of XP. Which I dread since I would have to re-do my entire wireless network also ... yuck...

 

[Chaz]

Well that was a semi-nightmare. I tried the Windows utility for back up but it won't work (some kind of error message).

Probably the drive is formated FAT32. Maximum file size is 4GB.
You can either have it split the backup file up into 4GB chunks or reformat the external drive NTFS.

 

[Sandan]

Good call, dang those are words I haven't heard in a long while