Backing Up a drive

ponderingturtle

Orthogonal Vector
ponderingturtle
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Jul 11, 2006
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I am planning on mirroring the drive on my new laptop when I get it, so that I could restore it if it dies and I know I have my information safe. I was looking for recomendations about what way people think would be best.

Is a normal external hard drive fine, or would mounting an apropriate hard drive for the lap top externaly be better?

What software do people recomend for this.
 
I don't like harddrive backups. Like any physical medium you can lose it or it could get destroyed in a fire etc.

I use Carbonite an online data storage system which cost about $50/year. It's got a very small program that is very easy to use.
You can also use Jungledisk which will do the same by with Amazon's data storage system. The price is cheaper and you pay pet gigabyte you back up.
 
paximperium said:
I don't like harddrive backups. Like any physical medium you can lose it or it could get destroyed in a fire etc.

I use Carbonite an online data storage system which cost about $50/year. It's got a very small program that is very easy to use.
You can also use Jungledisk which will do the same by with Amazon's data storage system. The price is cheaper and you pay pet gigabyte you back up.
Click to expand...

I think my new system came with 30gb of online storage for a year, I will have to remember that for this purpose, but this is as much about recoving a whole drive as it is saving important files.
 
ponderingturtle said:
I think my new system came with 30gb of online storage for a year, I will have to remember that for this purpose, but this is as much about recoving a whole drive as it is saving important files.
Click to expand...
I have about 1 terabyte of data backed up via Carbonite.
 
ponderingturtle said:
I am planning on mirroring the drive on my new laptop when I get it, so that I could restore it if it dies and I know I have my information safe. I was looking for recomendations about what way people think would be best.

Is a normal external hard drive fine, or would mounting an apropriate hard drive for the lap top externaly be better?

What software do people recomend for this.
Click to expand...

I'm assuming Windows. Acronis True Image does a good job of cloning drives. I did exactly what you are talking about when my laptop drive started to fail. I cloned it to an external drive, installed a new drive in the laptop and then cloned from the external to that. Acronis lets you make a bootable disk that can do things like that when you can't boot into Windows. It seems to be on sale pretty frequently for $25 or less.

I would backup to an external and install a fresh drive if/when your original drive fails but it's really a personal preference. If you absolutely can't go a day or two without the laptop then backing up to the 2.5" might be the way to go.
 
I use clonezilla. It's free and does a good job. With about a gazillion options some reading may be required, though. (And I hear that there are sometimes issues getting a restored Windows system to boot. But even if it's not booting you would still have your data.)
 
Er- surely systems like Carbonite use hard drives too?

My supposition is that a 500GB drive can die as easily as a 250GB one.
But you have two of those...
 
I've only seen one thing backed up in carbonite before:

carbonite.jpg


:jedi:
 
Soapy Sam said:
Er- surely systems like Carbonite use hard drives too?
Click to expand...

Yes, but admittedly, they aren't usually run in somebody's basement, but ought to be set up in a proper server environment which would reduce all kinds of physical risks. Chances are, your data would be stored on more than one drive and I'd expect drives to be used for a limited amount of time only. (It seems advisable to check your contracts...)

Storing your data in a remote location is also a good idea, so even if these people were using nothing but external USB drives there might be an advantage there.


(Unless, of course, we are wrong and they pay a lot of people to memorize all your data or something ... :duck:)
 
Yes, I assume they have some sort of RAID system or equivalent.
I backup to a 2nd computer and to DVD which is stored at my Mother's place, but I don't really have critical data anyway. Photos is about it.
 
I also have Acronis True Image (version 10) and I've found it easy to use and reliable. I save to an external drive.

ETA: I use True Image to mirror my drives, but I also back up my data with Synctoy, which is available for download free from Microsoft's site.
 
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External drives as a backup medium are OK, as long as you make sure to not use that drive for anything else (simply to not wear it out too fast), and as long as you store it elsewhere safe. As has been mentioned, a fire or water-damage can occur, and a broken backup doesn't help.

Also, make sure to backup the backup software! If you can do, make a live-CD thing that contains a minimal OS plus the backup software. That way you can backup and restore independently of the machine. Also, think about what you need to backup. A whole system image is nice for quick restore, but you may also restore some nasty virus/worm that way. A data-only backup is somewhat "safer", but requires you to re-install the OS and applications by hand first.

What i usually do is to install the OS, then install all the current updates and applications, then make a full image-backup of that system. After that, i only backup the working data on a regular basis. That way you can have a quick restore of the basic system & apps, while you have quick backups of the working data.

Using two drives is also a good idea. Make one backup on the first drive, the next on the second, the next in the first again, etc. That way you also have a fallback in case one drive goes mad.

In any case, i'm highly suspect about the online data storages. You simply don't know what can happen there. The access may get hacked. The company itself may do some nasty things. Not that i want to imply something, but you must be aware that by using such services you hand out all your data to complete strangers. You may encrypt it first, but that also means making the backup more complicated.

Also, be aware that without internet-access, and a fast one for that matter, the usability factor of such an online storage is rather limited to non-existent.

Greetings,

Chris
 
In my limited attempt to have a backup (of my desktop computer), I use Ghost for the software and an external HD (Seagate). I also made use of Ghost to copy (actually save and restore) the computer's old hard drive (80 gb) to a new one (250 gb).

Ghost was like $60-70 from Norton/Symantec. It also allows creating a bootable CD so when the computer drive dies it allows booting so as to restore the image to the new drive. I presume most imaging software has a similar feature.
 
ponderingturtle said:
I am planning on mirroring the drive on my new laptop when I get it, so that I could restore it if it dies and I know I have my information safe. I was looking for recomendations about what way people think would be best.

Is a normal external hard drive fine, or would mounting an apropriate hard drive for the lap top externaly be better?

What software do people recomend for this.
Click to expand...

Here is my backup method. I am using Acronis on Windows 7 RC and Windows Vista SP2.

Laptop - Windows 7 RC
Desktop - Windows Vista SP2
Each system has a 1 TB Western Digital External Drive

Acronis images my system drives on each computer on Fridays and creates daily incremental backups of my Data (docs, photos, e-mail, etc.)

My laptop is a work machine and my desktop is a home machine. On Mondays I swap the external drives, so that data is backed up to both and they are not in the same place at the same time. Chances of all 4 items failing at the same time is extremely small.

I don't trust my data to a web-based backup plan, plus how do update a 20 GB image weekly with a lowly 768 kb/sec connection?

PhreePhly
 
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