I AM going to start backing up - but best way?

[MrsCabbage]

I have realised that I am basically a lazy person and this is not good as far as backing up my files. I do it sporadically and this, I think, is because I have to think about what I am doing. So I think if I could make it a brainless activity of clicking my mouse a few times and popping rewritable CDs in and out then I would be far more likely to do it! Well thats the plan .

I am not particularyly worried about being able to reinstall my system the same as it was, because it is a bit messy anyway. I have a total of about 7 GB of stuff to back up. I hate having to work out clumps of 650MB to record on CDRW - surely there must be a program that neatly spans files?

Anyways, if you could help me to remain my lazy self then please give me some advice.

 

[pbxman]

DLT tape would be perfect if you dont care about spending $$$.

As far as a cheap spanning solution..Powerquest's Drive Image 5.0 will let you span CDR's, or backup and restore to hard drive very quickly. I cannot recommend these great, cheap, easy tools enough!

Partition Magic, and Drive Image should be in every computer-tinkerer's trickbag if ya ask me....(and no, i do not work for Powerquest!!)

Pbxman
Systems Administrator

Please let Tek-Tips members know their posts were helpful.

 

[ianf]

Sorry, being lazy costs, but you don't need to go as far as a full-blown DLT to back 7Gb up. There are plenty of family-sized as opposed to corperation-sized backup solutions out there.

One of the cheapest is; to install a second hard-drive and use that as backup space. You could get file replication to do the leg-work for you so that there is always a backup.

Alternatively a DVD-RAM will back 5.2Gb up, a DAT anywhere from 1 to 40Gb, other tape drives like Travan or AIT are out there. But for overall capacity vs cost vs ease of use vs speed I'd say that DAT would be the best. Ian

"IF" is not a word it's a way of life

 

[Yazik]

I agree with IanF... A second spare hard drive in the machine is a great place to store things temporarily as backup. You may also go for some lower-end tape backup solutions, if you're willing to be a bit more patient with restoring your data. (check Ebay?)

If you need to have this data mobile (be able to move this data around to another machine) you may even think about a Firewire hard drive. -- about $500. =) Hey, we can dream right?

 

[kelsen]

Your cheapest AND solution is as suggested above: back up to a second hard drive with Drive Image (or Ghost, or other similar software), with one addition: make it removeable. As an example, DirtCheapDrives has a kit (Dataport IV) for $45, although I've heard of others for less. There simply isn't any way to do it more economically, and you can follow the backup safety imperative you are now missing - you can store your backup in another location.

RFT!!!
Dave Kelsen.
--
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's intolerance.

 

[MrsCabbage]

Many thanks everbody for ur suggestions and I apologise for not getting back to u all sooner, but my internet provider (Telewest Broadband) have been playing games with my connection. I have recently used ghost and am very impressed with it! It also seems to be able to compress things very significantly (1.3GB to 0.7GB). Although, if somebody ie not the manual hadn't told me that ghost can only write an image to a Fat Partition then I wouldn't have achieved that much.