Backing Up

Chaz1

I am considing purchasing an extenal hard-drive for my laptop, to store accounts etc. My questions are, if anybody can help; Which is the best to purchase? and also will this help to speed my system up?

Thanks in advance.

flappg

I have a Mac Book Pro and use a firewire400 external drive using Tim Machine to backup. Works a treat.

Going to by a Time Capsule and connect up to my router soon though so i can drop all the files I want onto that, double the backup.

Also, if you have Mobile Me, you can back up on your idisk to the sky.

Sure there are similar options on a PC

flappg

Chaz1 wrote: »

I am considering purchasing an external hard-drive for my laptop, to store accounts etc. My questions are, if anybody can help; Which is the best to purchase? and also will this help to speed my system up?

Thanks in advance.

Do you know what connections your computer has?

USB?
Firewire?

Firewire 80 is the fastest but not sure if any PC's have this. Firewire 400 will be on most drives.
Depends on how much you want to pay, USB are cheaper but slower at backing up but if it is simply for accounts USB will be fine. Do you want it to be plugged in or to use the computer power? i.e not plugged into the mains? And will it be on show? Just some people want one to look nice, you can get nice slick black Lacie drives, or a Lego one if you wanted!

I'm a new poster so I can't post links.

nickj_2

for anyone who's interested i was searching for back up software on cnet.co.uk
and came across this , i imagine it works in a similar way to the mac time machine
there's a free trail available www.genie-soft.com/products/genie_timeline/features.html
i would have thought that winows 7 would have had something like this anyway ,

Skint_Student_3

Just my 2 pence..Comodo offers a simple and effective backup solution. There firewall ain't bad either.

Cheers

Alan_Thompson

synctoy is a great free tool for backups.
just do a google for synctoy, it's made by microsoft and totally free.
I use it to sync my My Docs folder to an external usb hard drive. totally painless :-)

mr_fishbulb

tradetime wrote: »

Alternatively, another leader in drive imaging has made a free version available that does not have the restriction of a particular make of drive. Paragon Backup Express.

Anyone got any experience of this?

Looks a lot easier than clonezilla, and I don't want to pay for Acronis.

superscaper

Alan_Thompson wrote: »

synctoy is a great free tool for backups.
just do a google for synctoy, it's made by microsoft and totally free.
I use it to sync my My Docs folder to an external usb hard drive. totally painless :-)

I'm now quite into using Microsoft's Live Mesh as well as Synctoy to have important files synced between my home and work computers and best thing is the Live Desktop so they're accessible from a browser anywhere. Also it has remote desktop built in as well.

mobfant

Having scanned the first post - the advantage of off-site backup is not simply if your house burns down but also (if you're using hard drive backup) if the computer and external hard drive gets stolen. I'm about to buy a networkattached storage hard drive and also subscribe to an online service.

joolsbfd

can anyone recommend an external drive that backs up automatically? i am very lazy and untechie, but need to back up data on computer before i come a cropper ... it seems that seagate replica automatically back up, but htought forum would be a good place for recommendations as i am trying to sort this out on own, and really this is like another world for me. the most important thing is that it automatically backs up, is easy to use, and is an external drive ... and then cost, of course!

thanks for any help

you can probably see i'm not computer savvy,as i'm not even sure i'm putting this in the right place on the thread, but here goes for now...