I have been using Mozy.com for a while now & am pleased with that on-line backup service.
I have also been using the Seagate software that came with the external hard drive I bought almost two years ago. However, I recently uninstalled that software and now my computer has been running better thanks to that (I guess).
So now I am looking for a new trustworthy backup solution to keep my hard drive backed up to my external hard drive.
I am running Windows XP Pro & have recently been trying to run the schedule task function to set up a daily backup with no success.
Any advice?
I wish I could help you a little more with this one. I don't personally use any specific software, I just manually burn files to DVD or to an external drive using Windows Explorer. For online backup, I use iDrive.
I have an external 1tb drive hooked up on a network that holds my main files.
I then copy all those files onto an external 2tb drive as backup.
> I am running Windows XP Pro & have recently been trying to run the schedule task function to set up a daily backup with no success.
>
> Any advice?
A perl script (with perl installed on the system, of course) does a pretty neat job as a scheduled task. I have my system set to back up modified files -- excluding certain folders -- to an external drive twice a day. As a perl newbie it took me some headscratching to get the script to work right, but it was worth the effort, and I've been using it for years now.
I use Jungle Disk with Amazon's S3 servers for offsite backup once a week. Reliable and inexpensive.
I recommend 3-1/2" floppies and I have about 1,000 that I could let go cheap. 😀
Actually, I just have several external USB drives and I copy files to them instead of using the supplied software. That just seems simpler to me and drives are cheap now. I have a 1TB drive that I paid $99 for over a year ago.
I have two 500G hard drives in my computer, same make and model. One is my primary drive, the other a backup. The backup drive is only connected when I am backing up and so there is little chance of it going bad.
Every week or two I hook up the backup drive and run Clonezilla making an exact copy of the main drive from the boot record up, partitions and all.
The nice part is that if the main drive goes bad, I simply disconnect the main drive, hook up the clone, and as of the date the clone was made, everything is exactly the same. It boots straight away, it runs all my programs, and Windows thinks it's the same drive and doesn't complain that I've changed the system. If you've run incremental backups onto an external drive or CD, you can put that back afterward.
There are 2 possible "gotchas".
One is that the clone drive must be the same size or larger. If larger, you may have some unpartitioned space after the cloning. That's not usually a problem, but if you clone a 500G drive onto a 1T drive, you'll have a lot of space you can't (easily) access without more work. You can't go from bigger to smaller.
The other is that you must know beforehand EXACTLY which is the master and which is the clone (target). Get the wrong one for the master and you are s****ed. However, that information is available in the Windows Control Panel/System/Hardware/Device Manager/Disk Drives tab. My master looks like this WDC WD5000AAKS-00A7B0, the backup looks like this WDC WD5000AAKS-001D74. The part after the dash is unique to the drive.
I'm sure there are other similar cloning programs out there (Norton Ghost?), but Clonezilla is free. I'm cheap. And I'm lazy. I've spent a lot of time in the past putting a computer back together from the original operating system and backups after a crash.
Carbonite.com
I think you need more than one backup. If something goes wrong in your system and you don't notice it before doing the backup process to your only other copy, then you wiped out the better version.
This could be external hard drives that you alternate from week to week, or burning CD/DVD copies to supplement the external drive, or the backup service through the net plus local copies.
Spend a little time once in a while checking the integrity of the backup copy.
Many years ago (era of mainframe with remote terminals) the big corp I worked for had a bad experience. They were going to make major changes to the system over a holiday, so they backed everything up and took the system apart. When they reloaded, they only had 90% of the files correct, the others giving checksum errors. They went to the previous backup and recovered some but not all of the bad ones. The next previous backup gave them a few more. A few files never were recovered.
It turns out they had a bad tape drive and nothing had flagged it, so they were writing bad backups for weeks before the big reconfiguration.
If you are burning CDs as backups, buy archival quality CDs, not the cheap stuff from WalMart. I use 83-year CDs for the data I just can't afford to lose, plus manual backups to an external hard drive. Once a month I copy everything offline to a subfolder for that date, so I have an historical record I can recover if needed.
It's like insurance - a complete waste of time and money, until you suddenly need it.
Thanks everyone!
I just noticed that my existing Mozy software also allows for local backup in addition to the on-line service I've been using for a couple years now.
The major appeal of Carbonite's standard package is unlimited storage for a very reasonable annual fee. However, you should know what you're getting for your money. First, what you're getting is backup, not archiving. Unlike major cloud providers like Amazon and Rackspace, Carbonite doesn't replicate data across multiple facilities. Rather, each customer's data is stored on a single RAID6 array. The RAID array offers decent protection against individual drive failure, but zero protection against a catastrophic site incident (e.g., fire or theft). In fact, Carbonite uses the customer's original copy as its backup in the event of a host failure, as it did in the 2009 incident that's the subject of Carbonite's lawsuit against Promise Technology.
Second, the standard Carbonite service only backs up the internal drives on a single PC. Network drives and external drives aren't backed up, so all those USB drives hanging off your PC are on their own. For backup of external drives you need Carbonite Pro, which is priced between $10 per month (20GB or less) to $250 per month (up to 500GB).
I currently have a little over 70GB on Amazon servers, managed via Jungle Disk. Most of this represents files on internal drives, but some of it backs up files on external disks. The Carbonite Pro charge associated with this amount of usage would be $50 per month. By comparison, my monthly Amazon S3 bill is currently a shade over $10.
I use SOS Backup. Price isn't too bad and you can link multiple of computers and backup data from any of them. They use encryption and store copies over several different sites.
