Backup Data, Imaging

[bubba100]

Looking at the “Ads by Google” shown on this page I noticed one listed as “Boot Disc for all Windows” its for a product called Power Suite (2010 by Spotmau.

Has anyone had experience using this product? I have 2 desktops at home, one for my wife (taking classes online) and one for myself. It’s about time to do “something” to backup our data. We have an external USB hard drive that is to be used for the storage. Both machines use Windows XP. I would rather not loose a collection of old jazz and photos. Nor is it in my best interest for my wife to loose her papers from her classes.

Thanks.

 

[kjv1611]

There really are a lot of different possibilities out there for backup.

Not sure about the one mentioned in the Ad. I'd check for any real reviews on the product and/or site to be sure.

But there are tons of options, I mean just tons...

So to be more specific on your end goal... What are your preferences? Learning something, just having something that works out of the box? Dedicated hardware? Just something that'll work for basic backup of data? Something that'll back up the whole systems?

If you want something that'll "just work" out of the box, and you can afford to buy the hardware, and you want it to back up all your data and your systems, and don't want to spend much time configuring, etc, then you might want to look at the different offerings for Windows Home Server machines. HP And Acer, at least, have some systems out there that seem popular in that area.

If you don't want to spend any money, and are fine backing up just the data between your 2 systems, then there are several optinos there. Microsoft has some "sync" programs out there that will keep everything sync'ed between machines on the same network... I've read an article not long ago that reviewed using a combination of 2 or 3 of the Microsoft tools to do just that.

Also, in the same category, somewhat, there's a program I really like for backing up between systems. It's called ActiveSync. The free version is plenty powerful enough for data backups at home - across a network. You can have it run on a schedule in the background.

And other dedicated harware options, you coudl build your own system, and back-up to it with any of the backup tools that support overnetwork backup, or with some of them, you could run the backup software on the backup machine. One nice free one is called FreeNAS.

And there are also external hard drives that come with backup software, some of them (I think) will do so over a network, which would be perfect as well.

I mentioned FreeNas. It takes a little time to learn, but not much. It will run on anything you can turn on, it seems, and once it's running, it just runs. You can run it from a floppy, a CD, a CF Flash memory card, or a standard hard drive..

 

[edfair]

A couple of flash memories would be sufficient. You could use Acronis to create an image of your drive on one per machine.

Or use Acronis (or PCBackup) to copy stuff to a usb drive, nas drive, or flash drive.

But the best thing would be to reorganize your data where it is easier to deal with. Mail,for example, by default is about 8 levels deep in a black hole. You can change the store location to simplify this. Same for documents.

I prefer to do my backups to CD using NERO. Makes it easy to find stuff from years ago. And I don't have to keep 5 and 6 year old data on the hard drive.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[goombawaho]

Cobian backup (free) will dump to an external drive or USB. It's nice, runs on a schedule if desired and is FREE. Lots of options.

 

[bubba100]

Thanks for the suggestions, now it's up to me to figure out the way to go.

 

[kjv1611]

I don't recall whether I've looked at that Cobian software before or not, but it does look pretty good from a quick glance here:

http://www.5min.com/Video/Cobian-Backup-on-Windows-XP---Software-Review-177534301

I'll have to try it out myself soon... maybe this weekend if I get the time.