backup software or drive?

[bad coffee]

I realized today I don't have a current backup of my laptop drive. What I'd like to have is a one-button backup.

I have an old 7200rpm 80 gig drive that I could use if I could find good software.

What do you use for backup? My dvd burner is crapping out so that's out of the question.

B

 

[nanchil]

I have the backup software for Maxter External Harddisk. Please lmk.

 

[Salesbig]

Well im guessing the only thing you really wanna backup are you files and pictures...

I would use a
either
1) USB Flash drive you can get a 2 gig..
2) or a 250 gig or bigger external drive <--- very fast backup choice..

usually both can be picked up pretty cheap on slickdeals.net.. and the flash drive would be much quicker..

or just replace your dvd drive... usually pretty cheap on slickdeals.net too..

good luck...

 

[digitalreefer]

Retrospect with any type of backup drive works well. I can give you a hand when I get back.

 

[SaltWaterN00b]

Try this, it will actually copy your hardrive AND all settings. $70 if you cant find another way of "aquiring" it

http://shop.symantecstore.com/DRHM/...06300&Env=BASE&productID=44315100&pgm=6037100

 

[Chiefmcfuz]

Ok here's my .02

Bret nobody should be without an 160 gig external usb hard drive these days. Western digital is the best buy a my book from them and feel safe.

Paying someone to clone your drive is a waste of money unless you are a company looking to salvage a crashing hard drive.

With the external hard drive just manually click and drag files from the main internal drive to the external drive. Do this on a regular basis and all will be well. I say manual because it never seems to fail when you are doing something the scheduled task kicks in and either messes you up or you mess it up and this can be bad for the backup. I also do the following, I take all of my license numbers and save them in a word file that is saved only on my external hard drive just incase I ever lose the hard copy of the number or the whole shebang I can either download the software from download.com and install it using my lic number or if I still have the disk I can access the file from the usb drive and my laptop and install no problems.

 

[bad coffee]

I've got spare room on external drives
(80, 40, 100, 80, there's a 100gig in my laptop) so external space isn't a problem. I just need recomendation on software. What I don't want is something that's always running. what I want to do is start a program, back up drive, close program. My laptop is 4 years old and it's not so fast. The less I have running on it the better.

And the DVD drive I have is the super multi drive, in my laptop. So swapping it out is a PITA, IF I can find the right one. It's the same drive that's in the macs, but they won't sell me a drive. And I'm not quite stupid enough to call acer and order from them. (a new keyboard was $30) I'd sooner buy an external burner.

So I guess I'm looking for software that I can run when needed/schedule to run once a week.

B

 

[WaterPlant]

Are you trying to back up the entire HD with the operating system or just data?

If the former, you can use Norton Ghost.

If the latter, you can also use Nero to back up the files into a CD image storing it in your external drive and when your new writer is back, you can write the image back to a DVD. Nero in general is free.

 

[NYreefNoob]

back up

nero software has a easy to use program as well if you go to cnet.com they have a ton of free programs. if you have msn click the techs and gadgets up top then on next page you will see where it says downloads click it, then next page to the right has where it will link you to where towards the bottom it says audio and video, click most popular and it will direct you to the cnet site. love the programs and like i said alot of free great programs and trust worthy one's from spyware to firewalls and such you will see where you can download programs and such

 

[Josh]

I'm a bit obsessive when it comes to data redundancy, but this is my process.

2 computers (my desktop and a file server)
Folders are replicated daily back and forth
2 partitions (one for music, one for data) I store different versions of each volume in different places (music on my PC and data on the server). This forces me to go to different locations depending on what I am working with. Its an extra step to make changes to the data so I can't screw anything up if I am drunk. Also, I get an emailed log of all changes between the two drives sent to me every morning.

Both machines have external drives. If I lose a drive I just pick up a replacement, verify the original contents, and force a replication (this has happened once from a head crash (damn cats)). A full 100GB replication takes an hour or so (100MB/FD LAN).

Also, I have an external USB drive enclosure. Every few months I replicate everything over to the drive and then put it in a safe place. This is to prevent data consistency problems. For example, if you backup every day, you will inadvertently replicate problems to the backups, so if I keep a spare drive with everything on it and only push the data there when I am sure that everything is 100%, I have a known good copy that goes back 3-6 months. I had a major problem with audio clipping in a large portion of my music library so I adopted this draconian measure.

My drives are 250-400GB externals, mostly Western Digital. I am only using about 100GB total.

Also, I backup email once a day and do a historical email backup (about 1GB) once a week. Every few months I will manually drop the old data.

Everything is done with perl or wsh scripts, except for the synchronization which is done with Smartsync Pro. It is extremely granular and allows you to configure lots of different scheduled profiles. I highly recommend this program, its great!

 

[Hitsnorth]

I use foldershare(www.foldershare.com) and mirror folders between computers. Then I dont have to think about backing things up its automatically done between my home computer/server/laptop so I have offsite backups always.

 

[Chiefmcfuz]

I don't like anything automated, I would rather do it myself and make sure it's done right.

 

[ming]

You can use a software called acronis which is an imaging software. If you just wanted to backup files, then just drag into another drive

 

[reefman]

josh must be an intel admin or something. ::splitspin