How often do you back up?

superscaper

techno12 wrote: »

Completely overblown threat/risk if you ask me (just like viruses - I laugh my head off sometimes at the insane media blurb on them "they can hack your bank account blah blah" - NO THEY CANT!). A lot of companies prey on the thick/ignorant/misinformed general public who are scared of 'viruses'

Ummm, keyloggers exist and people have found accounts (usually paypal etc) compromised because of them. And viruses can do other things such as shut down your home network etc (seen that one first hand).

Edit: not to mention where the majority of spam comes from, and even this very forum has been the victim of a DDOS attack. Concern for viruses isn't about propoganda it's about seeing the real world effects of them.

spud17

and have never had a drive catastrophically fail.

Made me laugh!

I've been around PCs for all of 3 years, just bought my first ever new hard drive.

It has lasted about 50 hrs.

Yes superscaper, it was all backed up.

I'd followed the articles in the newsletter from Gizmo of 46 Best Free Utilities fame

Details about how to go about it here Part1 and Part2 and Part3

Borrowing a HD for now, but the back up worked perfectly and doesn't involve buying any software.

You just need a bit of patience setting it up, restoring the image to a working system took about 20 minutes.

superscaper

spud17 wrote: »

Made me laugh!

I've been around PCs for all of 3 years, just bought my first ever new hard drive.

It has lasted about 50 hrs.

I've had at least one physical failure of a hard drive (maybe a couple of years old) I guess we must be in that insignificant minority. Or maybe we're just figments of someone's imagination.

spud17

I've had at least one physical failure of a hard drive

That's what happened in my case.

Started off as a ticking, thought = fan.

Within a minute it sounded the same as a CD scraping around in a cheap player.

BaritoneUK

I use Carbonite- https://www.carbonite.com and I would highly recommend this. It means you can just forget and let it get on with it. It's also quite cheap ($49.95 for the year- and the dollar is weak!). You will need a decent broadband provider as my in the first 2 weeks I backed up nearly 50Gb of data! Also this shouldn't be your complete backup solution- just the icing on the cake.

I would recommend SyncBack which has been recommended before and also SnapShot which backs up your hard drive byte by byte (basically takes a snapshot of your drive) - http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/
SnapShot isn't really for beginners but it's definitely worth trying.

A really fantastic product that is still in beta (and so for the time being free) is syncplicity.com - this enables you to back up your data online and also sync all of the data on another computer.

freaky_stuff

I hope im posting in the right place, but after redaing the first few comments i thought that the people on here know what they are talking about and so might be able to help.

I have just got a laptop for my 21st birthday yesterday, as it is desperately needed (am a student teacher -so lots of paper work).

Anyway the problem is, the laptop manual (Toshiba L350/L350D) tells me that i should create optical recovery disks. As i know little about computers i dont know whta this means, but i think it wants me to copy a programme called Recovery Disk Creator to create a copy onto 2 DVD-r or DVD-RW or DVD+RW.

The first question is which of these disks should i buy and how much are they.

The second is what do i need to copy and where do i find it (or does it do all that for me in the Recovery Disk Creator Programme).#

Any help would be appreciated, thanks

The_Chappers

On my Mac I use an external hd and the Mac OS has a utility called Time Machine. If the external hd is plugged in to the Mac it will backup throughout the day. I will then be able to roll-back to any point in time.

For the windows PCs in the house I use SyncToy (I think it's now a free Microsoft product). Again I use an external hd and the SyncToy application is easy to configure and schedule.

Occasionally I burn my photos to DVD and leave them at work. That way if someone broke into my house I wont loose everything. Most things you can replace and sort out, but not over 3500 digital photos!

Steve

techno-mole

we have 3 pc's in our house (technically 4) all are on a network, the kids have one upstairs, and theres 2 downstairs (well 3)
i learnt a while ago that its best to back up as often as possible, even if its just things like game saves, my kids play the sims games, and i once forgot to save the folders with the game info, it was a while before they would talk to me after that
so now what i do is any photos i tend to make 2 copies of, one copy on a re-writable dvd or cd and another copy goes on the file server i built, but things like game saves which can take up a fair bit of space go on the file server every week or so.

what i tend to do is back everythign up onto the file server then after a while anything like pictures, documents we need to keep etc etc go onto cd's or dvd's, which keeps the server fairly clean.

there are various ways to back up automatically on most operating systems.
on another note, the file server was free, i built it from bits and pieces i got from freecycle

superscaper

techno-mole wrote: »

but things like game saves which can take up a fair bit of space go on the file server every week or so.

I like Valve's announcement of Steam Cloud where they'll back up (supported) Steam Games including game saves. Can't wait for that feature to come out.

Stanbe

In answer to the OP, I back up to disk everytime i add new photos to the PC.

I have seperate folders on the HDD and everytime i get to about 4.5Gb i start a new folder. Currently on the 12 folder now ( i take A LOT of photos )
Each folder is backed up onto 2 DVDs. 1 stays at home, and 1 is taken into work and put in the fire safe.
Was tempted by an external HDD just at home, but if the house is burnt down or the PC and drive stolen then all my photos are gone.