How often do you back up?

Rabiddog_2

TO the poster on here (many posts back) who advocated backing up to multiple DVD-r or CD-r .. this is essentially a very bad way of backing up.. if your backup needs more than 1 disk. This is because, say the failure rate of Dvd-r is 1 in 1000 .. if your backup requires 4 disks, then if any one of them fails then the whole backup is useless.. this increases your possibility of failure to many multiples of (1in 1000).
Tape is good but too expensive.
IMHO an external hard dive is the only feasible solution for home users, unless their backup needs are 8.5gb or less (1 dual layer DVD-R disk)

powerfulone

I backup important work everyday - since I nearly lost it all when my PC crashed due to being switched off during update.

isotonic_uk

If you one of those people who doesnt want to backup everytime they work on something important. try getdropbox.com. With this you can add a machine and it gives you a 2gb allowance.


You install some software on your pc which is FREE and you point the software on specifc files and folders on your PC and it will synchronise these with a service online and anytime you work on those files or folders, it will make a backup of the file online so if your computer crashes you can retrieve it of the online version.

Really handy

thedealhunters

I try to every couple of months, I don't really have that much important stuff on here so don't really need to backup all that much.

Guyver-it

I backup daily using NTbackup which came with XP and I have also schedulled it to back up so I dont forget

MothballsWallet

I use Second Copy 2000 with a USB Zip 250 drive to run a full backup of my documents once a week and an incremental backup of them each day.

I've also got 50GB of storage with Adrive (it's listed in the free software article on the main site), and was looking at their backup tool. It looks nice and simple to use, but you have to buy it after a certain point in time.

eddidaz

When I was at uni I backed up all my work pretty much daily onto a second HDD, pen drive and my iPod as several HDDs and memory cards have failed on me in the past.

Now there's not much on my PC that's irreplacable and if anything goes badly wrong I'll just format. Having all my music, films etc. stored on a second HDD helps, but even my 2nd HDD has failed a few times and I've lost all my stuff. Meh, it happens, and there's way too much data to backup even once, nevermind regularly. Increasing internet speeds have also made each HDD failure slightly less painful

richard87

eddidaz wrote: »

When I was at uni I backed up all my work pretty much daily onto a second HDD, pen drive and my iPod as several HDDs and memory cards have failed on me in the past.

Now there's not much on my PC that's irreplacable and if anything goes badly wrong I'll just format. Having all my music, films etc. stored on a second HDD helps, but even my 2nd HDD has failed a few times and I've lost all my stuff. Meh, it happens, and there's way too much data to backup even once, nevermind regularly. Increasing internet speeds have also made each HDD failure slightly less painful

yeah i have had to many Failures but i still definatly back up on an external HD that i don't link up untill i need or to add to data. that seems to have work so far lol

valencia_2

I'm a Mac engineer and have lost count how many times I've told editors and journalists to back their stuff up at a national newspaper. If you want to see a grown up cry as he's just lost two years worth of writing a book - Don't BackUp just let your hard drive reach its limit and trust in fairies!! ;-)

Cuddles_In_the_Buff

At work we do a full data backup to DAT tape monthly and weekly and a daily incremental backup. I am wanting to purchase image based software for full system backup too.

At home I do a full image based backup monthly and incremental weekly.