Had a scare recently when our PC went down and had to be sent back to makers and was informed that we might loose all our precious photos and documents if it was the Hard drive that had gone wrong.
So.
What do I need to do to ensure our stuff is safe?
I was thinking of an external HD and backing up to it regularly.
But what if that goes phut?
What do others do? Recommendations of hardware too, if you please.
Cheers.
genie backup manager pro + 1 or 2 external hard drives. swap them over every week, keep one somewhere else. job done.
Have two external HDs. Back them up alternately, so even if both your pc and HD No.1 die simultaneously (unlikely!), you have HD No.2.
There are various expensive online back up services if you're really worried, but personally I'd just use external drives, or maybe DVDs as a cheaper but slower option.
Multiple external HD's that mirror backups, most come with reasonably usable backup software these days. I've had so many disks die I am the man of multiple NAS's
i back mine up onto dvd's and an external solid state hard drive - a large memory stick basically. No moving parts so less to go wrong, no problems so far 🙂
Will any old HD do?
Are some better than others?
Any features I should look for?
I will probably be looking in Ebuyer for them.
Cheers again.
Online backup not that expensive.
For example, £3.50 a month and no fannying about with external hard drives: http://www.carbonite.co.uk/
Problem is, how do you put a price on your data?
Some ISPs offer online backup for free, I know virgin do.
I've been there and done that with NASs and in my experience unless you spend a fair bit of cash, they arent worth it [b]just[/b] for backup. I would, and have gone down the route of external USB disks (not mirrored). Cheap mirroring just breaks too often, meaning its in fact less fault tolerant than single disks.
This is just my experience, I'm sure others may offer the opposite advise.
Windows7 comes with good backup software, else I used to use MS synctoy.
no. yes. buy a recognised brand. western digital, samsung, seagate, toshiba, hitachi my tiips, go for usb connection not firewire, buy from maplin not on-line.
Is Apple's Time Machine system any cop?
Is Apple's Time Machine system any cop?
Yes - dead simple to use.
yes it's great, a proper backup solution, but unless you are a computer whiz you really need a mac to run it. are you mac or pc?
As said, 2 hard drives ( cheap as chips ), constantly rotate them - one at home, one at work. Depending on employer you might also be able to copy the photos etc to your PC at work without being hassled.
If you have up to date copies of your photos on 3 drives in 2 separate locations it is going to take a meteor hitting where you live to lose your photos. Should a big enough meteor hit, I would assume that your photos would not be high on your list of priorities.
I am PC and not a Whiz, hence the questions and "Little-boy-lost" look.
I am looking at Seagate Expansions 1000Gig at the mo, £55("Do you want tweeters with that?")
Imp999 - I would look at "bus powered" 2.5 inch drives - they are smaller, and you shouldn't require an external power supply for them- they are powered by the USB data connection that you plug them into on your computer. They are, however, more expensive per Giggleybyte.
Imp999 - I would look at "bus powered" 2.5 inch drives - they are smaller, and you shouldn't require an external power supply for them- they are powered by the USB data connection that you plug them into on your computer. They are, however, more expensive per Giggleybyte.
like he said.
I use two seagate "freeagent goflex" 500gb drives on rotation, from maplin, £90 each, usb bus powered and the aforementioned software, £25 download from genie. for pc not mac.
everyone is saying the same thing. the answer is clear 🙂
I'm a techno numpty, but managed to buy a western digital external HD,plug it into my mac and back stuff up. Really, if I can do it .... 😉
I've always used external drives but like to buy the caddies and drives seperately - it's cheaper to do it that way (mostly). I also back up onto DVD. The cloud solution is interesting but I don't have that much data that I need to frequently back up.
waaaaay too advanced for this thread 0/10 😉
Yeah, current model MacBook...cool, will get one next time I'm in town.
when I was setting up my company backup the dude in pc world tried to convince me to buy a mac, just to run time machine to backup my windows server then use a third party piece of software to recover the files back to pc format from mac format. he claimed it was ok as i could get an imac for only £500 instead of paying £1400 for a macbook! utterly utterly ridiculous. i found it hard not to laugh. he looked me in the eye and told me there was no equivalent of timemachine for the pc. just wrong advice. did my own thing and it cost me £205. and it's better. cowboys.
What about just uploading all pics to Flickr ?
I've just renewed my subscription, was £15 I think.
Dont think there is a limit if you pay for the proper account.
go for usb connection not firewire, buy from maplin not on-line.
Why not online? And why not firewire? Just out of curiosity? My Amazon sourced drives have always been fine and I've always had mix of firewire and usb, never had an issue.
did my own thing and it cost me £205. and it's better.
Not entirely sure about the 'better' bit TBH, different maybe. I presume Genie allows you to do point-in-time recoveries? For the IT luddite I'd argue that Timemachine is pretty good - it just works out the box without the need for a great deal of expertise. My parents are useless with computers and they've used it without problems which is enough to earn my recommendation.
Anyway - seems pretty evident that the consensus is to backup and then backup some more. Having witnessed the hassle and expense a colleague at work went to in trying to restore his family pics when his laptop died on him I'd say you almost cant have enough.
I've a Dropbox account - $9 a month (I think) for 50GB of 'cloud' storage - just mounts on my mac as another folder and automatically syncs between local and remote copies. This also means that all my important documents / new music etc are available on my various laptops / home mac mini / work computers. I also try and get as many of my pics uploaded to flickr too (privacy settings mean that I can use it as storage solution as well as a gallery for friends and family).
We then also store all our music, videos, movies and photographs on an external drive which is available across our home wifi. This is backed up nightly to a second external drive using a Mac application called SuperDuper (free for slightly less functionality, about £20 for the ability to schedule backups). All the important documents on our laptop and main mac are also copied onto this external drive. Every couple of weeks I'll copy the backup to my work drive so I've a relatively recent copy there too.
I also take a weekly backup of our photo library onto a smaller, USB powered external drive, one of a pair, that are rotated with one kept at work, the other at home.
The point being that hardware failure is covered and also with copies stored 'off-site' so should fire / theft etc.
or, you could do what the head geek in our systems administration team has done and get one of [url= http://www.drobo.com/ ]the Drobo solutions[/url]. 8TGB mirrored. Complete overkill but he loves it...
Definitely worth considering an on-line backup solution; something that does continuous updates of changed files (like Carbonite does) means you never have to remember to do anything, move drives, files etc and gives you better protection against theft and environmental risks.
Why not online? And why not firewire? Just out of curiosity? My Amazon sourced drives have always been fine and I've always had mix of firewire and usb, never had an issue.
Not online backup because it takes days and days to upload your data and all the services that I looked at just keep your files for one month, so if you delete something by accident, backup as normal, and don't notice you have lost something for a month, you have lost it - great backup.
Drop box is ok, we use it at work for file transfer, but you still have to manage all the file backups yourself = hassle.
Not online purchase because returning faulty goods is a pain in the bottom by post and the gentle hands of Parcel Farce are not something you want in contact with your delicate electronics.
Not Firewire because it's not hot-pluggable, so if you unplug your drive without powering it down in the computer's OS first you stand a good chance of damaging it. Not so with USB, plug and unplug to your heart's content, perhaps not while writing a file, but even that doesn't seem to mess things up like it used to.
Not entirely sure about the 'better' bit TBH, different maybe
my opinion, thanks.