Back Up

[Doe Be Doe]

Recently my hard drive died and I spent a fortune getting data off of it. Going forward, what is the safest back up method? Are there software programs that back up a harddrive to an external hard drive? Are there internet sites to which you can upload your data? What is the best solution here?

 

Thanks.

[+ deej]

There is no one size fits all answer to the backup question, much less the restore question.

 

There are several different forms of backup and recovery. If your hard disk dies and you can simply replace the disk and keep the computer, a useful backup would be an image of your HD, which will restore the operating system and all drivers along with all your data. I use Acronis TrueImage and an external USB drive for this. I also routinely burn CD's with sets of data that I might need later.

 

I'm just recovering from a different failure. My computer died but the disk was still usable. I could have restored from image, but then I'd be restoring drivers from the old computer to a new computer and they wouldn't serve any purpose. Instead, I plugged the old hard disk into an external case and copied across all my data after setting up the new machine the way I wanted.

 

One friend uses a hybrid of scheduled scripts and external drives and simply uses XCOPY to copy all files to a backup drive.

 

There's just no way anyone can recommend one single solution because it won't work for everyone. My mother, for example, has a very simple backup stragegy: keep nothing on the computer you can't afford to lose. <shrug>