portable hard drive for backup

taurusgb

Is it possible to buy an affordable portable hard drive that I can use to back up more than one device? We want to do a regular backup of 4 laptops, is it possible to do this on one backup drive? and if so is it possible to buy one that just updates changed files and adds new ones rather than conpletely overwriting the old info?

I've been doing a bit of research on Amazon and have found a lot of reviews that complain the software from the portable backup device makes the laptop run slowly (even when not in use) and in one case altered the bios :eek: I am not a techie by any means and am easily confused (and scared by what I have read) so if anyone can offer advice or make me aware of any other points that are important, but that I may not know about, I would be grateful. TIA

NiftyDigits

NAS

Here is an example, though not a recommendation.
Hopefully others will post with actual recommendations.

Oblivion

I have 5 PCs to backup here, 3 on Windows 7 and 2 on Windows 8.

My solution was to buy a 'My Passport' 2TB portable drive and then instead of using any 3rd party backup software, I simply use Windows own backup utility to create an image of each computer onto the drive at regular intervals.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B007IA3S22/ref=wms_ohs_product?ie=UTF8&psc=1

If you leave the image in the root directory, the next backup for each computer will overwrite / update the last image. If you want to avoid this, you simply create a new directory for each image although this will start to fill up the drive much quicker.

Since the image file doesn't allow you to directly access individual files, I also regularly copy and paste the 'My Documents' folder to the 2TB drive as well, just for belt and braces.

googler

taurusgb wrote: »

Is it possible to buy an affordable portable hard drive that I can use to back up more than one device?

Yes, but define 'affordable' in pounds and pennies ...


We want to do a regular backup of 4 laptops, is it possible to do this on one backup drive? and if so is it possible to buy one that just updates changed files and adds new ones rather than conpletely overwriting the old info?

Yes


I've been doing a bit of research on Amazon and have found a lot of reviews that complain the software from the portable backup device makes the laptop run slowly (even when not in use) and in one case altered the bios

I've got around half a dozen portable/USB drives, and you need to note two points

1 you don't HAVE to use the software that comes with the drive, and

2 I've never had any of them re-write BIOS settings

esuhl

I don't even know how software could modify BIOS settings. I'm not sure that's possible without motherboard-specific proprietary code.

Anyway, as above, you don't need to use the backup software that comes with the drive. And yes, you can back up multiple devices to one drive.

I have two main backup methods. For the first, I use Acronis TrueImage to back up my data partitions. Acronis creates a single file containing a backup of all the files on the selected partitions. Once you have created a "complete" backup, you can subsequently perform an "incremental" backup, which just saves any changes that have been made since the original backup.

I paid for my copy of Acronis TrueImage, but there are probably many other (paid-for and free) alternatives. Any disk imaging software should do.

The other method is to use the (free!) software FreeFileSync, which quickly and reliably copies the contents of one folder to another. When you "synchronise" the two folders, the software quickly scans the contents so that only files which have changed are copied across. It's great, really simple software.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/

You can just create a folder on your backup drive for every device (or partition or folder) that you want backed up, so again, there's no limit to the number of devices you can back up.

If you're wondering which drive to get, I can say that I'm very happy with my Western Digital "My Passport" 1TB drive that I got for £55 recently, although I haven't used any of the software that came with it.

closed

any drive with a large enough capacity will work, so it depends on how much data is on each laptop http://www.ebuyer.com/320102-hitachi-1tb-touro-mx3-portable-hard-drive-0s03457

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx this is free, but won't do incremental/differential backups (not a big deal, just do a backup every so often), but the paid for version does

elektra

Oblivion wrote: »

I have 5 PCs to backup here, 3 on Windows 7 and 2 on Windows 8.

My solution was to buy a 'My Passport' 2TB portable drive and then instead of using any 3rd party backup software, I simply use Windows own backup utility to create an image of each computer onto the drive at regular intervals.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B007IA3S22/ref=wms_ohs_product?ie=UTF8&psc=1

If you leave the image in the root directory, the next backup for each computer will overwrite / update the last image. If you want to avoid this, you simply create a new directory for each image although this will start to fill up the drive much quicker.

Since the image file doesn't allow you to directly access individual files, I also regularly copy and paste the 'My Documents' folder to the 2TB drive as well, just for belt and braces.

Acronis does, and I believe Closed has previously said that Macrium does too.

pauldreed

Have you considered using an online 'cloud' backup service?
I use copy.com because it has the facility to sync files automatically between the cloud and one or more computers regardless to what operating system they use.
So in practice, if you want your data to be synced across all of your computers, any changes that you make in one computer would be replicated across the rest (and also stored online in an high security encrypted format).
If you want different data on different computers, simply sync to different 'cloud' folders.

The best bit is that you will get 15GB storage free, and a further 5GBs when you install any of the free apps to sync your data (20GB's in total - free for life).

Paul

debitcardmayhem

Of course the cynic in me says

pauldreed wrote: »

Have you considered using an online 'cloud' backup service?
I use copy.com because it has the facility to sync files automatically between the cloud and one or more computers regardless to what operating system they use.
So in practice, if you want your data to be synced across all of your computers, any changes that you make in one computer would be replicated across the rest (and also stored online in an high security encrypted format).
If you want different data on different computers, simply sync to different 'cloud' folders.

The best bit is that you will get 15GB storage free, and a further 5GBs when you install any of the free apps to sync your data (20GB's in total - free for life).

Paul

All see below afterlife ....
Whose life yours, your computers' or the life of cloud.com as an entity?
20GB how will that help if you have a 1TB drive nearly full and trying to sync with a 16GB iPad.

It is a stop gap nothing more and just a way of opening up your options. As for high security encrypted format you can make sure using Truecrypt or OpenSSL and make sure that you are not relying on their encryption algorithms.

Use a portable drive by all means , but don't rely just on that (use two and also keep one off site until you need to back up/sync again) also leave the files on the PCs too. Use the cloud for sharing(if you can trust it ...I do for none confidential stuff and use locally encrypted before sending for the rest before sharing over/in the cloud).

pauldreed

Hello cynic!
You can select what you wish to sync to each device, you don't have to sync the lot!
For me, 20GB is an awful lot of data, and is far more than what I have got on my computers, so it depends what you intend to sync, and if you have loads of videos to back up, well you will soon eat into 20GB.

In relation to 'life', that is their claim not mine, but the copy.com company is owned by Barracuda, which is one of the largest and most trusted online security & data storage companies in the world.

copy.com is not for everyone, but it works well for me, and of course it's freeeeeeee...

Paul

bob_a_builder

Not used it myself, but there used to be a product called "Clickfree" used to be be supplied as a USB HDD with some auto run software installed which could back up multiple PCs very simply

When I saw it used it seemed very simple to use and non technical , which is good the easier it is to use the more likely you are to do it

i.e.
LINK

example


But it may now have migrated to a software only product
i.e. LINK