I have decided it is way past time for me to sort out a backup solution for my home.
I need some recommendations on what to use. I will probably want to do a full back up to begin with and then an incremental backup going forwards. I have lots of MP3 files, which I can burn on to CD seperately but my other files are stored in several different locations on the PC.
I only have the ability to to back things up to CD at this point, so that is a consideration as well.
Does anyone have any suggestions or any backup software that you like
External hard drives are the only way to go. Decent sized ones like 120 GB can be found for under $100 online. There are generally just plug and play with XP. Many come with their own backup software and even have a one-touch backup button. I use a freeware application called Corbian Backup that does incremental backups every night. It only takes a few minutes.
If you wanted to, I suppose it could. You could partition it into multiple drives easy enough. Put hers on one partition and your on another. It shouldn’t be a problem although you would need to physically move it from time to time unless you want to do some fancy network stuff. That is doable to but moving one literally just means unplugging it from one and into another (along with the power cord).
You also need to guess how much space you actually need now and the future. If your computer has a 200GB hard drive and hers does as well, I seriously doubt wyou will need to ever back up 400 GB. I work on my computer hours a day and everything I have backs up in less than 100GB and that is after years of accumulation.
You can set backup software to back up only certain types of files and skip things like applications if you want to. That wouldn’t take much space at all.
Keep in mind that if you back up only data, when your hard drive goes south you will need to reinstall all your applications. At the very least, this can involve a lot of time. Consider backing up an image of your hard drive. I use Acronis True Image. The downside here is that you will need to get a copy of True Image for each machine you need to back up (it’s about $50 a copy).
If you’ve got a spare PC sitting around and are willing to get your hands dirty, I suggest rsync, at least for backing up your data.
As far as system and program backups, don’t bother. Make copies of all your program discs, and keep them in the same safe deposit box as the pair of USB hard drives you rotate out on a weekly basis.
You were planning on setting up a rotation schedule and off-site storage, weren’t you?
PS: You don’t necessarily need a third PC. You can set up your machine as the rsync server, with the USB drive. Your wife’s machine would then run the client as a scheduled task, and sync to the files on the remote USB drive.
BTW, I’ve never run the server on a Windows machine, but the client seems to work damn skippy.
I use SyncToy, one of the utilities included in Microsoft Powertoys for Windows XP. It’s free software and very easy to use to synchronize two folders. In my case I synchronize the original data on the C: drive with a copy on the D: drive (which is a second physical hard drive, not just a second partition) and with another copy on an external drive.
Note that I haven’t been able to configure scheduled backups using it. Also, it’s not designed to do a backup of the whole system but instead only synchronize selected folders. So I’ve got everything I care about in two places; My Documents and Other (containing my MP3s and other media). I could do a full copy of this stuff to the other drives, but that would take a long time; synchronizing them takes only a few minutes.
Several times a day, I run the program to synchronize the files on C: with the copy on D: and then once a week or so, I synchronize the files on C: to the external hard drive that’s stored off-site.
Also, you can use the external hard drive to back up both PCs, as long as there’s enough room on it.
First thing I recommend is putting everything into My Documents. Doing this lets you point a backup app at one folder, and greatly simplifies incremental backups as you’re not having to look hither and yon on the drive for files.
Once you have the discipline to keep data in one place and applications somewhere else, backups get a lot easier.
Corbian Backup is free and it can easily do that for you on any schedule you choose. My incremental backups scan the entire system and do incremental backups of every single thing and it usually completes in less than 2 minutes.
A caravan or mobile home in the garden? It won’t help in the case of a major natural disaster, but since a housefire is probably your major risk, it would be good enough provided you have sufficient separation from house. Also useful for guest accomodation.
What? He did ask…