So my friend calls me up and tells me the logo he was making for me was lost, because his entire hard drive crashed

I've heard many stories about this before, and then thought to myself my computer is really old, makes weird noises, and I have half my life on here. I've never backed up a single thing, or even thought about it until now.

Everything I read when I googled it, says don't back up tomorrow, back up now!

What's the best method to back up an entire hard drive? I want my entire computer backed up...My HD is 80GB, so not too large. What's the best affordable external HD? Also what's the best/easiest program to use? Does anyone know how long it takes to back up an entire computer, and how easy/difficult it is?

Thanks guys

 

Id just buy an external drive and read the box and get the one that comes with backup software. Most external drives do, it's pretty much a standard feature now a days. Then install and run that and you should be good

The little western digital passport drives come with backup software and start at about $50

 

with black friday, you can get a 1TB external hard-drive for less than 100 dollars! Thats more than 10x the size of your current HD! Use it for backups and other things as you see fit!

 

floppy.....

 

Winrar your files into 3.5mb each and copy them to floppy drives

 

I use two externals ; one just a drive another is from clickfree.

 

Five inch not 3.5

 

What exactly causes a hd to crash? Also are the external HD's less probable to crash? I could only imagine backing all my stuff, only to have the back up crash!

 

platters.

 

Just pick up either a new Internal or portable HD. They are very cheap now days. Most come with back up software or you can Copy and Paste.

 

r0dxx,

Have two backups and either do them both at the same time or rotate them every other time.

Drives crash mainly due to heat these days. Circuitry on the controller cards gets cooked or the mechanics in the read write swing arm return mechanism get funked up. Older drives can have the bearings or lube in the bearings go south, but this is more commonly found on drives that sit idle or off for long periods.

Also, file system corruption from the OS can cause you to lose data and people often think of this as a "crash" too, when in fact it's only a hard core communication problem between the drive and the computer.

I use Cobain Backup 9, but really any one will be fine. Acronis is another good one. Ghost is a technical program that also does a good job.

Also, although I am not a fan (control freak) take a look at online services too, like Carbonite.com.

 

Hard drives are mechanical. Anything mechanical will fail at some point. Hard drives aren't maintainable like car engines, so the longer you have your data not backed up, the longer you are tempting fate.

Storage is SO cheap now there is absolutely no reason not to have at least one backup on a separate drive.

 

I thought that software was dead. Or is it just an older version of Ghost?

 

Drop Box is another decent online service. I have their 50gb service for my photos just as a added backup. I had a power surge kill my computer and the backup HD even with a nice powersurge protector once and lost just about everything.

 

Shoot. I am outdated! V10 available...

http://download.cnet.com/Cobian-Back...-10071828.html


CNET Editors:

 

Probably better to just print everything out. Then you'll have a hard copy of everything on the HDD

 

So do you just take a drive with you so you have an off site backup?

 

Windows Live SkyDrive gives you 25Gb of online storage for free. that usually enough for pics and music but not your porn collection.

http://skydrive.live.com

 

I use three backup devices for my PC. One is a hard drive which powers off of a USB port and backsup the entire system. The other two are flash drives (aka memory sticks) and I use them for my personal files and directorys (hate the term "folder"). I have my machine configured so that this is quite simple which makes me more prone to doing backups more frequently.

If the system and application software craps out due to a drive crash, who cares. It's the personal files that are important.

 

Fixxor'd

 

Were I worried about the power surge issue or a fire, yes, but I have little or no critical data on the home computer and no real concern about a power spike, so it sits in an internal removable bay and I can swap out a second internal drive if I like.

 

I was going to use that to pass ISOs to friends until I found out that there is a file size limit of 50MB

 

Oh yeah I forgot about that. I use depositfiles.com for stuff like that.

 

Just curious, but are solid state drives more reliable or are there other issues with them?

 

Well, there are no moving parts so from that angle, yes.

Only time will tell what their true life expectancy is, but any SINGLE location for data is vulnerable and should still be backed up.

 

Well there's no moving parts so they should be much more reliable. I guess we don't really know yet cause they're still new compared to hard drives. But I haven't heard of any sort of failures so far. I guess the drive controller can still go bad like what happens in normal drives. They also have a limited number of writes before the flash memory goes bad but that number is getting higher and higher and more out of reach every year. The tech is still in it's infancy and things are getting cheaper and harder, better, faster, stronger all the time.

 

Stogie read my mind.

 

Also, stop fantasizing about Maria Shriver. She looks like a man.

 

 

IMO, the performance gained from an SSD is worth the price of admission. I wouldn't use them for a backup device yet because a regular hard drive is plenty fast for that. Once a 1TB SSD can be had for a couple hundred I may change my mind on that.

 

I have two backups of any and all important data, one stored off-site in case of a disaster.

I also use data dump/dcfldd to make an exact mirror image of my drive, so if it ever crashed I wouldn't have to reinstall all of my programs, drivers, files, etc...just stick the new drive in the PC and go. It's really easy for those that have never done it...I could post a DIY if anyone is interested.


And it still amazes me how many people still don't backup their data, and I'll never forget some of the looks I've got when I tell people they've lost everything.

 

You know where dcfldd came from, right?

 

Some Nick dude at the Dept of Defense Computer Forensics lab

 

If my memory serves me right (heh), SSDs suffer from the same problems as all flash memory, namely, they wear out. The circuits that hold the memory bits can only be flipped so many times before they lose their ability to hold a charge. Supposedly, you will see this as slowly shrinking available space. In theory, though that sounds like SSDs are good for static information, but not highly-volatile data, which is counter-intuitive to what people want SSDs for.

 

Yes but they last longer with each generation and I think most people are replacing them before they wear out. I think that's tied to the NAND flash that they use. I know they're exploring using other types of flash and I'm sure something new will come out in the future that doesn't have that drawback.

 

For example the lifespan of the next gen Intel SSDs have doubled or quadrupled compared to the current version



http://www.anandtech.com/show/3965/i...specs-revealed

 

Sure do. I <3 this class I'm in

 

Intel states MTBF of 2,000,000 hours. (over 200 years)
http://www.intel.com/design/flash/na...reme/index.htm

When a sector on an SSD is worn out it becomes read only, which makes data recovery easy. When a sector on a HD goes bad you have

SSDs evenly write to all sectors to extend the life of the drive. There is also no need to defrag an SSD.