Hi All,
I’ve got an external hard drive and never know what to do for the best.
I always used to use the Vista backup software that comes with ….Vista! and would tell it to back up and let it get on with it.
A while ago I was talking to a Dell enginer who was sorting out my daughter’s laptop under warranty. We needed to back up things so he copy
-and-pasted the valuable files onto her external hard drive. I asked him why and he said he has often had experiences where people had thought they had backed up their data, only to find out the software had let them down, and the data was lost. He said copy and pasting was safe, and it does make sense.

I’m just about to get a new stand alone hard drive and see it comes with a free software backup facility. This further complicates it!
Vista v’s hard drive software v’s copy and paste.

Has any IT people views on what’s best…?
Or has anyone had to recover stuff using Vista – and did it work?

yours in a quandry
Q

My (non IT) view is that sometimes the backup software puts everything in one large, possibly compressed file. This is fine if the same software restores it but sometimes I like to check everything’s been copied so I also do a simple copy in a batch file (using robocopy), which I can check. (and also restore myself).
(What I do now is a batch file copy of documents plus a Macrium backup of the OS.)

I always copy’n’paste. It keeps all the files in a format I can see and read, less chance of everything going. I also keep a few copies. Most of the bulk is photos that don’t change much. I use dropbox for day to day stuff, that automatically makes several copies and keeps one on-line.

As a dedicated photographer I regularly copy/sync 750/800gb (400,000 files) of files across computers. Best software I’ve found is Allway Sync. Much faster than copy paste and dead easy to use.

Is free for home users and only about $25 for huge use like I have.

copying and pasting can get you into problems, if a file is locked open the whole process halts, plus it really struggles when you have lots of files

I’ve been using use Microsoft RichCopy 4.0 – much much quicker than the standard copy and paste (it might even be free – cant remember I’ve had it so long) – robocopy is also good

Copy and paste also requires you do it all the time – it would be very easy to start saying “I’ll do it later” and let your backups fall out of date…

wow! thanks guys for taking the time to answer……
I take the point about copy and pasting, you can see the files immediately in a format I recognise and I find it reassuring.
But, I’m sure I’ve corrupted something from vista when somehow a file has gone over with me copying something and things haven’t quite been the same.
After a particularly big backup things seemed to go askew.

I’ll take a look at the programs recommended above and see what grabs me.
thanks peeps
Q