Backing Up Your Harddrives

[Bec]

Do you back up your hard drives?

If not, why not, and if so, what sort of system/software are you using?

Anyone using those Raid options?

Reason I'm asking is I just put myself through a two hour heart attack when I moved a drive off my old system to my new one, and the new system just kept saying the drive needed formatting. Talk about going nuts, as it has all my design work, my site stuff, client site stuff, and about 120 plus gigs of content on it.

I finally thought to change the drive jumper off master and switched it to cable select and rebooted. The computer "found new hardware" and I can now see and access the drive. You can bet your sweet bippy I will be adding a way to have that drive backed up.

[Alex_Manifest_M]

Bec, I have five 500gig external drives that back up (dual) all of our work each day at 1am. Our sites are backed up each week (after the main saturday update). All video is backed up to tape after it is transfered prior to editing and the photos are backed up to the drives and cds. The tapes and cds are taken from the safe to the bank once a month.

Backing up is not a problem once it becomes habit and our content can not be replaced if lost.

[Bec]

Ok, but what handles the backups -- software? I really need something that is a "push/click this and I'll handle it", or a "backup for dummies" where I just tell it save this drive to this drive forever and I'm done.

[Chilihost]

Absolutely, I do a full backup usually once a week to an external LaCie disk (software included) and then I store the external disk in my safe. I learned the hard way, after losing about a month's data when my house got hit by lightning 3 years ago.

Great thing about the external disk is that if you are upgrading computers like you did, you just have to plug it into the new PC and you have full access to all your data instantly. You don't even need any special software as its recognized by XP (& I assume vista) immediately.

[gaystoryman]

Got me a seagate external, came with the software and does it while I work actually, so its always current. :kickcan:

[Xstr8guy]

I just bought a 1 TB Maxtor RAID 0 drive for backups. However, the Retrospect software that came with the drive hangs-up before it finishes a transfer.

Can someone recommend a good alternative to this bundled piece-of-crap software?

I also have a Buffalo 500GB Network drive (Raid 0) which was meant to be my backup drive. But using it as a network drive is painfully slow even though I have a top-of-the-line Lynksys wireless router. Now i don't really know what to do with this drive.

I also have 2 other older Maxtors (200Gb and 250Gb) externals that I don't really use anymore and don't know what to do with. Plus another 500Gb RAID 0 internal on my computer which I try to keep relatively free of unnecessary files to keep performance fast.

[Bec]

I realize I have some grey areas where some of this technical stuff falls, but I would assume that backing up drives, would also backup a virus as well?

[Chilihost]

Bec, yes thats correct, thats why you buy a big-ass external and keep generations of backups.

[Xstr8guy]

I realize I have some grey areas where some of this technical stuff falls, but I would assume that backing up drives, would also backup a virus as well?

I only backup 'my documents' folders. And unless the virus is residing there (which is not likely), it shouldn't be a problem. But I may be wrong about that. I don't really see a need to backup system files. If I lost my main drive, then I would just reformat and reinstall everything.

[Bec]

Jim, have you switched out to the SATA drives yet? They do have external drive boxes to house the SATA if you don't have SATA available on your motherboard. The way they were explained to me was, think of the IDE drive pipeline as being about as wide as a sipping straw in a mixed drink, and the pipeline for a SATA being like a big round milkshake straw. Much faster transfers as a result.

[Chilihost]

Can someone recommend a good alternative to this bundled piece-of-crap software?

Windows has a built in backup utility called ntbackup. Start -> Run -> type "ntbackup" (no quotes) and click OK.

Its a basic backup utility that works, just make sure you shut down all running apps first.

[Xstr8guy]

Jim, have you switched out to the SATA drives yet? They do have external drive boxes to house the SATA if you don't have SATA available on your motherboard. The way they were explained to me was, think of the IDE drive pipeline as being about as wide as a sipping straw in a mixed drink, and the pipeline for a SATA being like a big round milkshake straw. Much faster transfers as a result.

I'm not sure what SATA is. My internal drive is a SCSI RAID 0 drive. And my externals are Firewire

[Chilihost]

I only backup 'my documents' folders. And unless the virus is residing there (which is not likely), it shouldn't be a problem. But I may be wrong about that. I don't really see a need to backup system files. If I lost my main drive, then I would just reformat and reinstall everything.

You may be missing out on some essential files, programs such as outlook by default save their data files in fucked-up places which are not My Documents, its a hangover from pre-win95 days. Plus some programs also use the registry to store info (cuteFTP I think uses the registry to store your FTP userid/passwords).

[Xstr8guy]

Windows has a built in backup utility called ntbackup. Start -> Run -> type "ntbackup" (no quotes) and click OK.

Its a basic backup utility that works, just make sure you shut down all running apps first.

Can I select which folders/files to backup or does it just do a full system backup?

[Xstr8guy]

You may be missing out on some essential files, programs such as outlook by default save their data files in fucked-up places which are not My Documents, its a hangover from pre-win95 days. Plus some programs also use the registry to store info (cuteFTP I think uses the registry to store your FTP userid/passwords).

Ah bummer! Maybe i can setup one of my other older externals to backup the system and my new 1 TB Maxtor to backup 'my documents'. I do a lot of video editing and would rather keep 'my documents' folder on it's own drive.