Storing your photos and files - a SATA HD?

happyhero

Hi

I am worried if my PC ever goes wrong that my files are all at risk ie photos etc and I do have a lot on there now.

What do you recmmend as a backup, I could back them up to CD's or DVD's but I have seen some not work after you have them for a while. They don't seem to be so reliable as for example, bought pre-recorded CD's and DVD's.

Someone suggested buying a external HD to me, so I looked them up and saw that you can now get SATA external HD's at not too bad a price.

Where do most people back there stuff up to for best safety?

Also if I bought a external SATA HD I assume I would have to buy a SATA PCI card in order to plug it in on the outside, is this so or is there another way to plug external SATA drives in?

I must say, if this is so, I can't believe they have found another new connection to put on the back of a PC, why can't they stick to one really great one for everything, oh well.

Any help appreciated.

Browntoa

any storage medium can fail, HD ,CDR, floppy...regular back-ups to CDR is safest in my opinion

wolfman

Backing up only every becomes an issue when you lose your data and realise you had nothing in place.

I have two computers at home, so zip and backup files between them. Just means if one goes down the other has a backup.

I also use DVD-R's although this can be more time consuming and isn't automated.

I recently bought a bigger hard drive too, kept the older one, but basically use it to keep a shadow copy of all my work. This isn't automated either, as I have to plug it in every so often and update, although it is handy. Acts like an external hard drive.

And finally, for any really important stuff, such as my website source code, or things I've spent a long time on, I backup to an ftp. I've got hosting with plenty of space, but ISP's will often give you hosting space. I just zip up the files, and encrypt them, then they get uploaded.

For any backups I use SyncBackSE, there's a free version, and also a more featured paid for (£8) version. Great value, and it automates all my backing up, zips stuff, encrypts it, can do versioned updates, incremental updates, update to an ftp, and it emails me should anything fail. Tempted to right my own app as a little project sometime, but for now at £8 it's great value.

One thing with backups. Every so often check them. Actually open up the files or do a dummy restore. Many people do backups but don't check they can restore from them. Oh and if using DVD-R's, always verify the data upon burning.

cwoodham

I would recommend a disk image to a backup removable hard disk. That way you have a bootable drive with all your data and photos if anything goes wrong.

I had a hard drive failure last year but luckily managed to get most of the important stuff onto a new drive before it finally gave up the ghost. As I use my computer to work from home I decided not to get caught again. A friend who runs a small company making and selling PCs recommended I get a removable hard drive and make a disk image to it. He did it for me and used Norton Ghost (understand Acronis True Image is also good for this) to image my complete C drive to the removable hard drive, I think its a Castle Removable Hard drive housing with an 80Gb disk. It just slides into a spare housing in the front of my PC whenever I want to back up additional files. He also wrote a small program so I can back up important files once a week or whenever I want, i.e. My Documents, photos, email inboxes and outboxes, Excel files, etc.
Although I do have antivirus and anti-spyware, I now have piece of mind that if I have a serious hard drive problem again I have all my important files on the back up drive and I can boot up from it.

wolfman

Yeah I do the same (but with Acronis). I have my hard drive partitioned, one is for Windows, the other for all my files and settings. I even put my Firefox/Opera profiles on the other partition. Basically anything that is personal or may change.

I setup Windows perfectly how I like it, then image the Windows partition. Should anything go wrong with it, I can restore my image without the worry of anything important getting overwritten as all my files and settings are on the other partition. Basically means I can recover Windows in 5 minutes without any hassles, instead of having to try and recover files, and then reinstalling everything. Such a time saver, especially with my parents!

Acronis v9 is the latest, but v8 which is fine can be picked up for about £10-15 if you look around.

GaryS

With a partitioned drive, do you still not run the risk of losing valuable data if the HDD fails ?
All of my apps ( Word, Excel, etc) are set up to save files to a single DATA folder, containing many subfolders; DOCS, Excel, etc.
This folder is then backed up everyday (incremental backup scheduled in SyncBackSE) to an identical DATA folder on the 160GB D drive.
The same is done for Digital Images.

Once a week a scheduled backup calls for a DVD-RW disc and backs it up to Removable media. In addition to this all archive Digital images from previous years are stored on DVD-R.

I have tested the restore facility several times by deleting certain folders and even individual documents, and it has so far worked every time.

Overkill ? I do not think so, I work in IT on various platforms and it is surprising how many restores fail !

Windows XP and any applications can be reinstalled any time there is a major failure, your DATA is irreplacable.

wolfman

GaryS wrote:

With a partitioned drive, do you still not run the risk of losing valuable data if the HDD fails ?

Well you run the risk of losing data on any hard drive should it fail, partitioned or not. I actually have two drives. My second hard drive with all my personal stuff, music etc... is less likely to fail than my primary hd (with Windows on it) as it's not used so intensively. But for people with only one drive partitioning it is a good idea as it seperates your personal files from Windows (should it go wrong).