How often do you backup your hard drive?

[bg]

I m amazed by the fact that between 50- 70 percent of Computer users do not backup their hard drives mainly home users and small business owners. I have had cases where customer hard disk crashes or have been infected by virus, my first question is have you got backup?. Their answer to this question is usually no.

I have put together a computer guide to address some of the usability issues facing home users and some small business owners. The idea came while I prepare my own designed handouts with relevant screen captures for our One-On-One Computer training to cover what is learnt in each lesson, I think the layout and content of the All-In-One Step-By-Step Computer guide is about the best I have seen - either in books or course handouts.


Book Chapters can be view here (http://www.bgcomputers.net/All-In-One.htm)

[SmallBizSoftware]

Lots of small business don't backup any content as some smarmy box seller has convinced them that Raid 5 will solve all problems (like they really need anything above raid +1 ... 5 only sells disk and slows recovery for a small user).

Lots are afraid the the technology, product names and jargon, SDLT, ATL, Legato, ArcServe, iamges, ghost etc.

Most do not realise that you can buy backup solutions as a managed service where your data is backed up for you and stored remotely off site.

More Details Here (http://www.smallbizsoftware.co.uk/backup.htm)

[Top Hat]

Daily.

Weekly off site

(That important data only, not whole hard disk)

[bg]

That is good Top Hat. Daily backup is very important, you can never predict when the hard disk will become corrupt. I agree with you, you don’t need to backup the whole drive it is time consuming and do required a lot of space depending on the capacity of the hard disk.

My advice to my clients is; always use the built-in windows utilities as much as possible except anti virus and spy-ware applications. Some third-parties utilities software out there does more harm than good to your PC.

[dave2005]

I backup all my data to tape every night and I use Veritas Backup Exec 9, but that's maybe overkill for your needs.

Norton Ghost is a fairly good cloning package, and it's cheap.

[CG Effect]

I use a Maxtor One Touch external hard drive. only have to press one button on the drive and it backs up the lot in seconds.


www.imagemann.com

[William Wilson]

Photographs are stored on two different hard drives (mirrored). WIP is on another separate hard drive and copied to DVD on a working basis.

Source and master photograph files are catalogued and burned to DVD. These are stored in a fire safe, I don't back up system files as I scrub down and reinstall every six months to keep things fresh.

[DuaneJackson]

I use d_backup to run scheduled jobs to zip and backup data to remote FTP sites. Works well for our needs, very cheap too.

www.backupforall.com

[William Wilson]

My biggest problem is I have around 1TB of images to maintain, don't fancy using my ftp for them some are over 1G each.

[Pilfo]

I use a Maxtor One Touch external hard drive. only have to press one button on the drive and it backs up the lot in seconds.



ImageMan,

We have been looking into the Maxtor One Touch range, which one do you use/recommend?

Pilfo

[bg]

Hi Pilfo, If you are are looking into the Maxtor One Touch range. Take a few minutes and read some review here (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0004HPY28/102-7429895-6396933?v=glance&n=172282&n=541966&s=electronics&v=glance)

Regards

bg

[CG Effect]

The new Maxtor 2 will be very fast the good thing about the back up software that comes with it is it only saves all your work the first time you back up. After that you press the button and it searches for files that have been added and changed since and adds them to the backup folder. This means that if it takes one hour to back up the first time the second it might only take 10 sec like it does when Im backing up my 3D work I press it every hour or so because its sensible to do so and doesnt slow my work down.

[dagr]

What's a "backup"?











Just joking....

Back up varies from temp. backup every 2 hours when editing or creating a lot, to once a week when largely out of office, etc. Currently using multiple, alternating DVD-RWs (which are checked on a different PC and then kept off-site) as a temp solution but will migrate to some better solution. That Maxtor thingy looks interesting.

[james.hill]

The true way can be found here: http://www.taobackup.com/

*Grin. It's a good guide and a humorous/interesting read.

[bg]

Hi ImageMan,

The software that came with the Maxtor Drive is really good, preconfigured to perform incremental backup after the first full backup that is why it is very fast.

[fedias]

Twice every day offsite using cybackup.com

[safesys]

All disks RAIDed. Daily full backup to iomega REV disks stored offsite and another daily incremental online backup to a server in a nuclear bunker.

We practice what we preach :)

Cheers

Chris

[profitxchange]

weekly

I have a pair of identical HD's and clone the master to the slave.

This means I can boot into the slave with no time wasted uploading backups etc.

I can then clone back to the corrupt drive or a replacement once its fixed.

Whilst this is not a popular solution it works well for me.

[RayB]

Right - who remembers floppy discs - ah those were the days :)

BTW - we backup to a remote data centre every night. IMO whatever method you use it is vital so have data backups OFFSITE in case of fire/flood etc

[openmind]

I run an hourly incremental backup on critical data and a daily one for non-critical stuff to a second hard disk. This is then mirrored to a second removable disk which comes with me. Weekly I archive stuff onto DVD...

[Mandrake]

I back up my work daily onto another local machine, and less often (but still regularly) onto DVDs which go offsite.

But a lot of people ask me for recommendations for how to back up (usually home-level users just trying to backup up photos, maybe some email, etc, preferably without having to think about it much). One thing I'm looking at is the Internet-based services, such as BT Digital Vault. Does anyone have any comments or experiences of these to report?

[ken_uk]

Daily database backups, by cron job, stored locally on server, and ftp'd to a second server, backups rotated so I have daily, weekly, monthly copies.

Also download as often as I can to local pc(s) but not as often as I should.

Similar for essential config files and code, but weekly backups, rotated, stored locally, and on another server and downloaded occassionaly as required.

Not ideal, but better than nothing..

[RobertSagoyan]

I think backuping of hdd is very important. I met this problem when all my information was lost only after shutdowning the computer.
Never want to feel this feeling when you understand that all my information is lost.

[PS Business Solutions]

I use Back Up Direct online backup. It costs £70 per qtr and backs up my data overnight. Like a previous poster said, the first backup takes longest as it backs up every file (every file I've asked to be backed up not the whole HDD), but subsequent backups only include documents I have amended or created since the last one.

I've never had to do a restore from it yet so can't comment on that. Browsing the logs I can see the files easily enough, so it doesn't look like it would be difficult if I ever need to restore.

[dave_n]

I use acronis and take a differential image of all my pc's every night. That way I can simply restore the image to any new or fixed machine.

[coxadmin]

I back up to Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com/raf/signup.aspx?RAFUserUID=69203&a=0) and it runs constantly, while the system is switched on. In addition I back up to an external hard drive hourly. In both cases the initial backup took a very long time but subsequent backups are a lot faster - I don't even notice the Carbonite backups running.

[KM-Tiger]

I've never had to do a restore from it yet so can't comment on that. Browsing the logs I can see the files easily enough, so it doesn't look like it would be difficult if I ever need to restore.

Would be worth doing a restore - maybe just a file or two - so you know it works, and so you know exactly what to do if the proverbial hits the fan. You don't want to be fumbling around then.

Practising restores, maybe every 3 months or so, should part of contingency planning.