# How do you back up your data?



## Steve H (May 15, 2006)

I'm seeing/hearing more about offsite services for hard drive back up. What are the pros & cons? Any recomendations? I was using a Maxdor external HD for my system but it was causing a "blue screen of death"...............


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## Stuart Sweet (Jun 19, 2006)

Remember there is a difference between backup and archive. 

Backup is, I want to keep a second set of data, I want to keep it current. A hard drive is good for that, you can rewrite it over and over and it's fast. I use an I/O Gigabank with Retrospect Express HD. 

Archive is, I want to keep this forever, possibly take it off the computer. A hard drive is a spectacularly bad idea for this. Hard drives fail eventually and then you lose everything. For archiving I use Verbatim DVD+R.


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## DCSholtis (Aug 7, 2002)

Using Time Machine on Apple OS X Leopard with a 250GB WD Passport Hard Drive.


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## dmspen (Dec 1, 2006)

In WinXP Pro, you can run a batch file during login or logoff. I have one that copies the 'My Doc" folder to an external drive at every logoff. It overwrites only files that are updated. I originally started doing this to a 1 GB thumb drive stuck in a USB port on the back of my PC, but with the advent of several digital cameras in my family, backups got...large sometimes.


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## Steve H (May 15, 2006)

I have about 20 gigs of music on a hard drive with no backup. It's taken a few years to get it all and I want to make sure that when the drive dies I still will have the music. DVD the best for this?


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## Cholly (Mar 22, 2004)

I'll be getting Acronis TrueImage 11 to use as backup software. It allows full backup, incremental backup and more. I'll use it with a 320 gig WD external USB drive.

I've learned a bitter lesson from my pre-Thanksgiving hard drive failure (with no backup). Lost all my documents and photos.


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## Earl Bonovich (Nov 15, 2005)

Basically:

All of my Data Drives... are RAID-1 (Mirrored)
So I am protected for the most part from hardware failures.

All of my important data (such as our digital photo archive) I semi-regularrly dump them off to DVD-R's

I am constantly on the lookout for a cheap tape archive though...

I currently have 2tb of hard drive space accross my three main boxes
And soon will be adding another 1.5tb of space


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## DCSholtis (Aug 7, 2002)

Steve H said:


> I have about 20 gigs of music on a hard drive with no backup. It's taken a few years to get it all and I want to make sure that when the drive dies I still will have the music. DVD the best for this?


Or iPod......


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## Stuart Sweet (Jun 19, 2006)

Steve H said:


> I have about 20 gigs of music on a hard drive with no backup. It's taken a few years to get it all and I want to make sure that when the drive dies I still will have the music. DVD the best for this?


Write audio CDs, that is the only way to make sure the DRM on your legally purchased music doesn't prevent you from putting in back on your computer in a way that you are entitled to do, within the rights of your user agreement when you bought the music.


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## Steve H (May 15, 2006)

Stuart Sweet said:


> Write audio CDs, that is the only way to make sure the DRM on your legally purchased music doesn't prevent you from putting in back on your computer in a way that you are entitled to do, within the rights of your user agreement when you bought the music.


Is that CD R's or CD RW's? Or does it make a differenct?

Thanks MUCH for the info


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## Ramalama (May 2, 2007)

Stuart Sweet said:


> Write audio CDs, that is the only way to make sure the DRM on your legally purchased music doesn't prevent you from putting in back on your computer in a way that you are entitled to do, within the rights of your user agreement when you bought the music.


If you write audio cds, you are essentially burning to cd files in the .cda format that can be played back on a portable cd player, in a car etc.

If you make data cds and use the .mp3 format there is no DRM. If you have iTunes m4p you have to convert them to .mp3s first or you will get stuck first burning to cda format and then having to reimport them.

And if you have DRM .wma files from Microsoft, you have to go through the same rigamarole.

The problem arises when you try to make audio cds - the cda files are huge and then, if you want them back on the computer you have to re-rip them and then they have been compressed twice and the audio quality goes way down.

If you want to play music on a device that is not your computer you have to Finalize the disc. IF on the other hand all you want to do is archive stuff, you can you use CD-WR formatted as a removable drive. That is what I do, only I use DVD-RW and can back up my 90g iPod with ease. I also keep my music backed up on an external drive. That makes 4 copies of everything - the iPod itself, the iTunes library on the boot drive, the archived albums (full album rips) on the DVDs, and the Windwos backups done incrementally on the external. Nothing is foolproof except that redundancy helps.

There are three options available to you for downloaded music that can be readily backed up:

Do your own ripping from your own music cds that you have bought - the original remains as a backup.

Download only mp3s from sites like eMusic that allows you to purchase a really broad range of artist material except for the most pop of pop music.

Download the DRM-less version of music from iTunes for a buck a tune more.

Go the illegal route. They don't make it easy do they? There are little applets that allow you to remove DRM but I am not going to say more in an open forum. Of course I don't use those!


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## Spanky_Partain (Dec 7, 2006)

mozy.com


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## cclement (Mar 22, 2004)

Spanky_Partain said:


> mozy.com


mozy.com for off site as well and 500 GB EHD for onsite back up.

You get 2 GB free with mozy and works well.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Cholly said:


> I'll be getting Acronis TrueImage 11 to use as backup software. It allows full backup, incremental backup and more. I'll use it with a 320 gig WD external USB drive.


Remember that imaging is only valid for an identical mechanism. Windows may decline to run if it notices that the hard drive serial number has changed. I'm pretty sure that it won't work with a drive that has different geometry.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

cclement said:


> mozy.com for off site as well and 500 GB EHD for onsite back up.
> 
> You get 2 GB free with mozy and works well.


You can get a 2GB USB drive for $14.99 that is much handier if your computer is being fussy.


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## JM Anthony (Nov 16, 2003)

I've got one of HP's new MediaSmart Home Servers on order. I've run out of real estate on my home theater PC and need to back up my work related files and provide remote storage for my daughters who are away at college.

John


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## Cholly (Mar 22, 2004)

harsh said:


> Remember that imaging is only valid for an identical mechanism. Windows may decline to run if it notices that the hard drive serial number has changed. I'm pretty sure that it won't work with a drive that has different geometry.


I wasn't talking about booting from the external drive. The nice thing about Acronis is that the distribution CD is bootable, and you can restore your system from the saved data. It's a much more flexible program than, say, Ghost.


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## cclement (Mar 22, 2004)

harsh said:


> You can get a 2GB USB drive for $14.99 that is much handier if your computer is being fussy.


I agree, those work great, but an off site backup is very important. If there's a fire or something bad, and destroys the PC and drive, your backup's no good.


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## tzphotos.com (Jul 12, 2006)

I use SyncBack SE to another computer in the house over my local network. 

I would like to find a good off-site backup for my files, God Forbid something really bad happens to my computers.


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## funhouse69 (Mar 26, 2007)

This really is the magic question isn't it? This one area that has NOT kept up with the times. Think about it, today we have 1TB Hard drives that are insanely inexpensive but to be able to backup 1TB of data would take what 250 single layer DVD's? Forget about CD's. To buy a Tape Solution that will backup that much data would cost thousands of dollars. 

Personally I have been in the computer industry for many years and this is something that I fight with all the time. To try and survive a single drive failure I keep all of my critical data on a RAID 5 and so far I have been able to survive several single drive failures over the years. 

That said I have about 5TB of video / Music on my network that I don't have any backup for except for the original CD's / DVD's. But I also am a photographer that has completely embraced the digital age. So on top of the Video / Music I have just under 1TB of Pictures that Is almost impossible to backup as well. 

This to me is going to be the "Killer App" or device that is going to make a ton of money. Someone has to come out with a reasonably priced backup solution that can deal with all of the digital media that we have these days. Gone are the days of 1,000 word documents fitting on a floppy


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Cholly said:


> The nice thing about Acronis is that the distribution CD is bootable, and you can restore your system from the saved data.


My admonition is with respect to your drive mechanism dying as opposed to being able to restore from someone installing software or deleting files that they shouldn't have.


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## Cholly (Mar 22, 2004)

harsh said:


> My admonition is with respect to your drive mechanism dying as opposed to being able to restore from someone installing software or deleting files that they shouldn't have.


In my case, if I had backed up my system using Acronis True Image, and installed Windows XP on my new hard drive, then the lost apps, and finally restored my *data* files from my backup, I'd be in good shape. As is, since I don't have a recent backup ( I did a backup in August, using a freeware backup program, but didn't note the program I used, so can't restore the data), I'm out of luck as far as all my documents and pictures are concerned. Lesson learned.


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## steve053 (May 11, 2007)

harsh said:


> Remember that imaging is only valid for an identical mechanism. Windows may decline to run if it notices that the hard drive serial number has changed. I'm pretty sure that it won't work with a drive that has different geometry.


Not true w/ Acronis. You can open an image and pull out individual files/folder etc. You can mount the image on a logical drive without re-imaging a new hdd.

Steve


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## kevinturcotte (Dec 19, 2006)

I have an additional hard drive right in my computer that I manually keep identical to the main drive (Just no programs of Windows installed). Everything really important is also backed up onto DVDs, and I tend to do backups every 6 months or so. I also have a 3rd hard drive that is in a hard drive enclosure, and connects via USB. EXACT copy of the 2nd hard drive, expect it's only connected to the computer when I want to put something on it, so if anything should happen to the computer and both hard drives fry, I still have the 3rd safe.


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