What do you use to backup your computer with?

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Broadside

Guru
Location
Fleet, Hants
Fair point about your house not burning down, in reality not that many do however lots of people get burgled with computer kit getting nicked. I use an external hard drive as well as Mozy online backup - £4.99/month for unlimited storage, so while it is not cheap it is run by EMC who are big boys in the computer storage world so I think they are pretty trustworthy to get it right. The first backup did take 2 weeks to run but the daily automatic backups are now done in under 5 mins providing I haven't just saved Gb's worth of data to the computer.

I tend to look at these things about how I would feel if all the data went missing, and for me £1 a week is an acceptable cost for peace of mind.
 

joebingo

Über Member
Location
London, England
There are 2 ways to do a backup, the first (and easiest short term) is to buy an external drive, and copy every file and folder which you want to back up to it.

The second and more technical way of doing it, is to create a disk image (exact copy) of the current state of your hard drive and save that to a different media (ext. hard drive/ dvd-r's etc), and in the event of a failure, you can just load that back up and start where you left off. Symantec make a product called ghost for this.

I've never personally bothered to keep a back up though, It's not hard to keep a PC in working order, and hard drive failures are a slow process. Just keep your anti-virus/spyware up to date and keep your firewall on and you should be fine. Use the external storage for something interesting and back up your documents, photos, videos and music when you start hearing a clicking noise coming out of your PC or when it gets r...e...a...l...l...y...s...l...o...w... to load up 'My Computer'.

My system has a my documents folder that was created in windows 98 in 2002, and has outlived 3 computers, and 5 hard drive failures, so it's not just luck.
 

gaz

Cycle Camera TV
Location
South Croydon
I've never personally bothered to keep a back up though, It's not hard to keep a PC in working order, and hard drive failures are a slow process. Just keep your anti-virus/spyware up to date and keep your firewall on and you should be fine. Use the external storage for something interesting and back up your documents, photos, videos and music when you start hearing a clicking noise coming out of your PC or when it gets r...e...a...l...l...y...s...l...o...w... to load up 'My Computer'.

My system has a my documents folder that was created in windows 98 in 2002, and has outlived 3 computers, and 5 hard drive failures, so it's not just luck.

What happens if your house gets burgled? theres a fire in your house? your house gets flooded?
 

joebingo

Über Member
Location
London, England
What happens if your house gets burgled? theres a fire in your house? your house gets flooded?

I see your point, but all of those three could mess up your backup too, unless you do it online as dmoran suggested. Also, storage is pretty expensive.

Short of having several different indentical disk images stored in different locations and updated daily, you always run the risk of losing your stuff. I'm just putting out the experience that I've had.
 

derall

Guru
Location
Home Counties
Alternate between two external HDs

~ 1TB WD drive that I keep at home

~ 320Gb WD portable drive that I always carry around with me as my "off site" backup (on the 'if you're not backed up off-site then you're not backed up' principle)

I use LaCie Backup software left over from an old external drive, but that is still better than anything else I've used recently
 

summerdays

Cycling in the sun
Location
Bristol
We have also been known to take an external drive on holiday with us in the car, or remove the drives at home before going on holiday so that if the PC's are nicked the information doesn't disappear with them.

I could be using all the wrong words here as I say Mr Summerdays is the very technical one - the main thing I know is all our devices on our network are named after cartoon characters! So you get messages saying "Homer has failed to back up properly".
 
and hard drive failures are a slow process
I take it you have a UPS to protect against powersurges.
Though that won't protect you against a psu failure.
Hard drive clicking implies mechanical failure whereas the controller card
can die without a sound which will require a professional recovery service
unless you're prepared to source an identical drive and swap the cards on the off chance.

Note to OP, your parents didn't store their negatives in a safe deposit box, took far fewer
photographs which therefore had much higher individual worth yet didn't lose sleep over
the possibility that the four horsemen of the apocalypse would deprive them of them.
Just get an external drive possibly a portable one as they are more robust.
Took an external drive on holiday :laugh: . Nutters.:rolleyes:
 

Norm

Guest
Note to OP, your parents didn't store their negatives in a safe deposit box, took far fewer
My kids' parents still do that. :shy:
 
You're meant to replace the battery in a ups at specified intervals otherwise it stops working.
Also make sure it's inline otherwise the power goes down for the length of time it takes the battery
to kick in.
Don't buy cheap ones neither in the same way that you don't but cheap psus if you value your pc
as it defeats the point of trying to protect your system.
Your kids parents ? Is that the same people as your parents kids by any chance ? :laugh:
 

BigCol

New Member
Hello

In my opinion, the best way to back up your data is using an online vault. There are loads of companies offering this service - some are free for a small amount of data (<2GB).

I use iDrive and pay about £3 per month for 150GB of storage. I have set mine up to do a daily backup of my files. The first time you back up your data, it takes quite a while (depending on number of files and internet speed) but once this is done, it doesn't take long to do the daily backups.

I used to use Squirrel Storage as their software detected changes to your files and uploaded them as soon as they changed but I found that the daily backup suited me better.

This solution completely protects your data from failure of your equipment, theft, fire, etc and I think that £3 per month is nothing when you have piece of mind that all your family photo's, etc are completely protected.

Other advantages of an online service is that you can also access your files from anywhere in the world and some services link into social network sites, etc, etc.

Col.
 

ayceejay

Guru
Location
Rural Quebec
Back up is like insurance: you get it the day before you need it any time after that is too late.
I had my truck catch fire once and the very next day I bought a fire extinguisher: my truck
has never caught fire since.
 
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