Fastest Way To Back Up Hard-Drive

Mr_Vincent

I regularly back up all my stuff onto removable media and every quarter my entire hard drive using Norton's Ghost.

I use WinXP Home service pack 1.

Problem is Norton's Ghost takes over 2 hours at 36MB per minute.
I have 6000 mb.
Not good for an impatient person like me.

Does anybody have any suggestions like maybe a USB pen or something?
I am in UK so prices would be useful.

This has probably been answered before but I do not have broadband nor the patience to go looking around for this info.

wolfman

It shouldn't take Norton Ghost that long to backup. I used to have the 2003 version, and to take a 6gb backup of Windows would take around half an hour. What are you backing up to? Another hard drive?

I now have Acronis True image, which can do the backup from within Windows (Ghost 2003 had to use DOS). I actually took an image just last night and it took around half an hour too.

If you are worried about how long it takes, why not set it going before you go out somewhere, or set a scheduled task so that it runs while you're at work.

alanrowell

Why are you backing up everything. I only backup stuff that's changed since the last backup along with a few things that are essential. Takes about 10 minutes a month and that's just using DVD writing software

sra

I just got a copy of Acronis True Image 8 on the front cover of PC Plus.
Not the full version and I don't know how limited it is yet but I'm hoping it will let me do incremental backups - Which is the big advantage of Acronis.

Haven't tested it yet

Mr_Vincent

wolfman wrote:

What are you backing up to? Another hard drive?

CD-RW's - 12x speed.

Are USB pen's any help in this area?

Nelli_2

I'm not surprised it's taking you so long !
A) That is a lot of CD's
The write speed is horrendously slow.

I'd say you are bottlenecking yourself with the media.

About the best way would be to use DVD media.

I use Nero to make a complete HD Backup onto DVD's takes about 15 mins to write to a 4x DVD-r media the entire 4GB partition.
(btw 4x DVD speed is a different ratio to a CD Writer and significantly faster)

DVD Writers are reasonably priced now and very easy to install.

I'd had to https://www.svp.co.uk and grab yourself a Pioneer 109 (£30) drive and a stack of the cheapest 8x media you can buy.
Pioneer drives are renowned for writing disks on pretty much any media so don't splash a tonne on expensive DVD media.
You can write 4gb in about 8 minutes at 16x, your 6gb should take long at all if you did a complete HD backup.

I have tested Nero, restoring partitions using backups and I can tell you my C: drive went from formatted to up and running in about 25 mins.

However Ghost is an excellent piece of software if you want to make incremental backups.

blinky

The fastest way is to backup to a hard drive.

If you are backup up for harddrive failure then setting up a RAID 1 array would be a good option.

vultura

Writing to CDR would be quicker than CDRW, assuming your drive is faster than 12x write.

flang

buy a 40 gig hard drive, stick it in a usb caddy.
Copy over all the files.
Job done.
total cost: £55??