Data Backup

mjturner23

Would anybody be able to offer me advice on what would be a good choice of external hard drive and associated software for backing up my PC's data? Any help would be very gratefully received.

S0litaire

If your machine has USB3 then get any USB3 compatible external hard drive. It will cut down the backup time dramatically, otherwise any external drive will do as long as it's at least as big as your current system or big enough to store everything on your current drive plus 50% more.
That should give you room for a compressed complete system backup plus a User data backup and a good few months of differential or "bit level" backups.)

People have their own favourite backup solution but I'd stay clear of Windows built in backup, I've always had issues with it randomly refusing to run backups, once it starts that, the only way to get it running is to reinstall the backup server system completely from a known good copy... >_<

I've got a fast enough connection (60/10Mb fibre) that I can use SpiderOak as on-line backup with a local copy on my File Server, so if my net connection goes down I can still access my backups or if the file server fails I've still the on-line copy.

rmg1

I'd also steer clear of the built-in Windows version.
I use Macrium Reflect (the free version).
I back-up (not clone) the drive in 3 separate ways to 2 spare HDDs.
A complete back-up to a spare internal drive (both partitions).
A Windows partition to one folder on an external drive and a documents backup to a different folder of the external drive.
I also keep separate copies of each backup so if something goes pear-shaped I've got a lot of chances to get my stuff back.

Note to self - run the back-up for this month!!!

mjturner23

Many thanks to S0litaire & rmg1 for taking the time and trouble to reply, I'll certainly follow your advice.