How do I back up my Hard Drive?

[allgonepetetong]

Hi guys

As above really, I've got a few hundred photo's of my daughter and holidays and stuff and really couldn't bear to loose it all.

I have some blank DVDs, how do I get all my C drive onto DVD?

thanks

Pete

[Raify]

You'll need some sort of backup software that will compress the data on your C drive, and split it across DVD's.

The popular ones are Nero, Norton etc. IIRC there's even a windoze backup function.

Or you could buy an external hard drive which comes with one-touch backup software. Depends how much data you're looking to backup.

[khushy]

DONT EVER USE MS BACKUP!!!

Restoring from this file is a nightmare.

Just buy another HDD and copy all your data over on a regular basis.

HDD are cheap and quick enough nowadays.

Khushy

[TUS 373]

khushy said:

DONT EVER USE MS BACKUP!!!

Restoring from this file is a nightmare.

Just buy another HDD and copy all your data over on a regular basis.

HDD are cheap and quick enough nowadays.

Khushy

Seconded - don't use MS Backup!!! It has cost me dearly using that when the time came to restore but the data had disappeared. IMHO, the safest way is to use an external drive and just copy and past on to it - you can see exactly what you have then, and put the disk in a safe place away from your computer when you are not using it.

[Fish]

Just remember to take the HD out of the room or if you have a garage etc buy something like a Buffalo linkstation hide the link station in the garage connect via cat 5 and back up automatically to the linkstation.

House broken into linkstation not found nothing gone. Fire is then your biggets risk assuming your garage etc isn't seperate.

[Scraggles]

i make monthly backups with nero, it is easy to do as have had hard drive failures in the past, DVD's kept in their case dont "fail"

[pcameron]

Fish said:

Just remember to take the HD out of the room or if you have a garage etc buy something like a Buffalo linkstation hide the link station in the garage connect via cat 5 and back up automatically to the linkstation.

House broken into linkstation not found nothing gone. Fire is then your biggets risk assuming your garage etc isn't seperate.

The other solution is to use one of the online storage sites (e.g. www.orbitfiles.com) this insures you against even a house fire. There have been rumours recently that Google will be coming out with a similar system (Gdrive?) at sometime in the future, which looks like it will be very good.

This type of service will only give you room to backup the photos rather than the whole of your C drive, but all of the operating system part of the system can be recreated if you need to.

[GreenV8S]

Scraggles said:

DVD's kept in their case dont "fail"

That's what they used to say about CDs, isn't it?

[J1mmyD]

250Gb external USB hard drives are £79 in the high street (maplins) ... I'm sure you could find them cheaper if you had a looksie and it's by far the easiest way to back up lots of information.

[greenlandy]

I find Acronis very good.
www.acronis.com

[[k]ar|]

As I have a striped RAID array, I have to be extra-diligent with backups - if one drive fails, all the data is lost. I therefore bought Norton Ghost 10, which is basically the latest version of PowerQuest's DriveImage in drag. It's nice as it can image a drive (ie make a full backup of all files and system data) on-the-fly, without rebooting or needing to drop to DOS. For restores, you boot off the install CD and connect your backup media. It cost about £20-30 for an OEM copy.

[k]