Backup solutions?

[rat156]

Hi all,

I'm wondering what everyone is doing for backup solutions for their images.

I lost my main HDD the other month, luckily I have a Mac and use the Time Machine feature of the software, so it only cost me a new HDD. I must admit I'm a little paranoid about this sort of stuff since I lost some digital photos to another hard drive failure a few years back. Then my solution was to back my images up to DVD, it only took about six or so. Now I have a Nikon D300 with an 8Gb card in it which I often fill at an outing. These are just family pics etc, but I still want to have a backup of them.

My present solution is to whack another Hard disk in the computer and copy the entire pictures folder to the new hard drive, remove it, do that again and take one of these disks to my sisters house for safekeeping, I have two in rotation there. I also use a HDD dock which takes internal drives and makes them external USB.

Although this solution works, I was wondering if anyone has a better way? I was thinking of Blu-Ray, but the disks were expensive and they only hold 47Gb each.

Cheers
Stuart

[jjjnettie]

I'm going through this at the moment. My laptop, on which everything is stored, is slowing dying. It can only run in safe mode now.
I need to do a complete back up in the next couple of days or I might lose it all.
My external hard drive packed it in last year, and I lost all my previous back ups that were on it.
Looks like I'll have to do it to CD. A long and tedious process, but safer in the long run.

[multiweb]

I use Acronis True Image. Works for me and I'm very happy with it. It saved my ass a couple of times. I back up all my computers weekly on external Sata drives that I plug in a E-Sata base. Differential backups take between 10-15min per machine weekly then I unplug/power off the back up drives and shelf them until next week. I can recover OS, data, everything even back on a blank drive. No brainer.

[sheeny]

Have a look at SecondCopy. Well worth the few dollars to buy. I have profiles set up to do a complete copy of each drive (for initial back up) and then daily profiles that run each time I shut the PC down to copy changed files.

I prefer to copy rather than back up. It makes it so much simpler to retrieve the data.


Al.

[White Rabbit]

I use Acronis as well. As soon as my laptop looks like it's slowing down I format it and install the hd image. Works a treat. I back all the images up to a network drive.

before that i use to have to format the pc and a reinstall everything update everything. formatting would be a job that took a couple of days to get the pc back to it's former state with all the apps installed and up to date. No it takes a couple of hours tops.

[rat156]

Hi All,

Thanks for all this, but I was after the hardware side of the equation. MacOS has inbuilt backup software, which as I said works a treat.

Cheers
Stuart

[jjjnettie]

:) I went out this afternoon and bought a Maxtor OneTouch 4 500gb external hard drive.
A very nice unit.

I transferred all my files from the laptop, while in safe mode.
Then just before I was going to format the lappy, I thought I'd give it one last chance. I set System Restore back an extra 2 weeks, rebooted, and it worked!!
Guess it knew I meant business this time. I can be pretty scary at times, who'd have thought I could intimidate a puter.:rofl:
Going to set it up now to do regular, automatic backups.:thumbsup:

[Wavytone]

Hi Rat, as a fellow mac user I have Time Machine set to backup everything to an external HDD. in my case I have a Ministack (ordered from OWC), it also provides extra USB and firewire ports for cameras, scanners, iPhones, memory sticks, eyeTV, and whatever else you have. The interface is Firewire 800 - waaaayyy faster than USB.

The Ministack goes to sleep when the mac does, and is very quiet when running (as is my iMac).

It works a treat and I have tested to see what restoring from it is like - OSX will indeed do a full restore from the TM backup exactly as you would hope.

[Barrykgerdes]

I guess I am better endowed with computers. I use Acronis to back up Vista and Drive Image all other operating systems onto DVD's and separate partitions on the hard drive. I also have a network of 5 computers at various places in the house that all have the same data on them.

The basic way I configure a system these days is to make a boot partition that contains the operating system and all the main installed programs then separate partitions for information that gets changed regularly or is special private info like images and documents and a partition to contain the operating system images.

The operating system partition is saved as an image with Acronis or Drive image to a spare partition and also to a DVD. The other info is backed up to other computers regularly.

I also have made a bootable DVD/CD that contains DOS 7 and a swag of recovery programs that allows me to boot up from a CD/DVD if the computer has a major outage that. From this I can usually recover anything of importance from most hard disks.
Note: DOS 7 does not read NTFS so I never use it. (except for the Vista partition)

Barry

[pmrid]

I ducked into my friendly neighbourhood computer bits and pieces shop the other day with half an hour to kill before a dentist appointment. Asked them a similar question. I use a wireless router at home to let others access the internet. The solution offered was a 1 Terabyte HD external storaqge attached directly to the wireless router so all computers in the home can backup to it. The one offered had 2 x 1 Terabyte HD in it so they could be configured as a Raid array - meaning that the data is backed up to both HD, not just one. That would me the storage available would be #1 the local computer's HD; #2 any SD cards etc you use (I use a 16GB SD card) and #3 the network storage. The system suggested priced in at about $450 but there is a single HD version of the same thing that orices in at about $100, they said, but didn't have in stock. So that still leaves you with your local machine HD plus one offline HD so it's probably a reasonable configuration for $100.
Peter