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[Jonnyram]

I mean the inevitable could happen - your PC crashes and takes out the HDD with it for some reason. Or get hit by a nasty new virus which formats your machine's disks for you.

Do you have a backup plan?

I don't, but I'd like some ideas before I start.
I have a base partition about 20 gigs, then 2 big ass drives of movies, music, photos and games. The photos are the main things I want to hold onto (and would be suicidal if I lost), but other stuff is important too y'know.

I'm thinking to DVD backup the photo dir (if it fits) and then come up with a way to divvy up my music into about 50 DVDs. Probably use a couple of DVDs for my C drive too.

 

[mrklaw]

You could buy another HDD and backup to that. eg external USB2. Get one big enough to back up 2 sets of data if possible, so you don't need to overwrite a good one when you backup. Then backup weekly/monthly depending how often you add stuff.Store the HDD somewhere safe. Check the backup periodically.

Liklihood is that only one HDD will fail, so you should be able to replace the HDD and restore.

You could also do a ghost backup of your entire HDD image, so if you get a HDD crash you can get your whole PC up and running very quickly (apps, system stuff etc)


I DVD my photos, but not my music. Most of it is ripped from CD anyway. I need to get a system in place. I might go for a networked HDD that is on 24/7, so I can use that for streaming music etc. Then back that up to my PC HDD.

 

[Link648099]

After some close calls with data loss, I've taken some precautions. I have two internal hard drives, each with one partition to it. On the C drive, I keep all my music, pictures, movies, programs, etc. that I dont want to loose. On my D drive, I keep a totally seperate copy of the same data. Back up is super simple. I just select all the folders i want to back up, and drag them over to the D drive. Makes an exact copy of it all, in a decent amount of time. In addition to that, I also back up the same data to my 20 gig mp3 player, just in case theres like a fire in my house or something and i have to get out quickly. I could just grab it and run. It certainly beats copying data to tons of DVDs.

This has worked flawlessly for me the last three years, without any data loss what so ever. Im soon planning on buying an external hard drive to take the place of my mp3 player, and when i get the extra gigs, im just going to make and backup a whole image of my C drive to the D drive and external HDD. Doing this once a week or so should keep everything pretty well.

 

[explodet]

I back up EVERYTHING I receive/download. I've got stacks of CDRs, I just recently made the move to DVDRs.

A hard drive crash would mean little to me.

 

[Myllz]

Buy Norton Ghost and make an image of your entire machine.

 

[Hooker]

Or just go RAID1

 

[isamu]

Buy Norton Ghost and make an image of your entire machine.

Hmm, can you elaborate on what this does specifically? Link?

 

[stonedwal]

My current backup plan is "I'll make those backups later." Has been since I built this machine. I should really get around to doing it, but I'm not going to lose anything that I can't get back with a little bit of patience.

 

[iapetus]

I mean the inevitable could happen - your PC crashes and takes out the HDD with it for some reason. Or get hit by a nasty new virus which formats your machine's disks for you.

Do you have a backup plan?

Yup. Run around screaming for a while, then pick up a sniper rifle and start picking off Microsoft employees from the top of a tall building. Unless it wasn't Microsoft who wrote the software that crashed the PC. If that's the case then I'll pick them off from a ground-level location concealed by bushes.

 

[Bregor]

I use Norton Ghost to make a backup image of my HD to an external USB HD once a month, or just before I plan to make any major change to my system.

Twice a year I use Norton Ghost to burn an image to DVDs, and store them in my safety deposit box.

 

[Drexon]

I burn everything "rare" I have. The rest, like movies and anime I know are out there anyways.

 

[mrklaw]

Norton Ghost basically makes a duplicate of your entire hard drive. So you can then boot up from a Norton boot CD and restore an exact image of your hard drive back again following a fatal HDD crash or even just your system going screwy.

You're up again in 10 minutes.

 

[goodcow]

My setup:

DRIVE C - 120GB
DRIVE D - 30GB
DRIVE E - 200GB (firewire)
DRIVE F - 80GB (USB2)
DRIVE M - 80GB

Drive C is personal data, which I backup to drive E monthly with WinRAR using best compression, in 4.7GB chunks which I also offload to DVD+RW in two sets, with 10% parity with QuickPAR in case one set fails.

Drive D is mostly junk multimedia I downloaded.

Drive E is the backup/video editing drive. I can't backup the stuff I'm editing since it's too huge, but source tapes are always kept in storage, and finished projects are backed up to DVD+R.

Drive F is basically dedicated solely to my Sony Cybershot, and it's full. All photos have been backed up, month by month, to DVD+Rs.

Drive M is my Windows/software drive which I don't need to backup other than the Steam folder, which I've yet to do.

I really can't wait until I can just burn this shit to BlueRay.

I also have another 200GB drive lying around that I'm going to replace the 30GB one with for backup purposes.

 

[DaCocoBrova]

Keep in mind that Ghost images assume that you have the exact same hardware, so it will load the drivers used when the image was created. You change some hardware and install the image, you can have some major headsaches.

I haven't used Ghost in years. Does it have a Windows GUI now? I only had the command line version.

My only fear w/ putting stuff on optical media for long term storage are the dreaded Cyclical Redundancy Errors.

 

[Bregor]

Keep in mind that Ghost images assume that you have the exact same hardware, so it will load the drivers used when the image was created. You change some hardware and install the image, you can have some major headsaches.

I haven't used Ghost in years. Does it have a Windows GUI now? I only had the command line version.

My only fear w/ putting stuff on optical media for long term storage are the dreaded Cyclical Redundancy Errors.

Norton purchased Powerquest recently, and the most recent version of Ghost uses tech from Powerquest's Drive Image.

It has a Windows GUI, and you can restore individual files or folders if you wish. So even if your system is completely different, you can still rescue your data files.

 

[Deku Tree]

I back up to DVD-R's. Then again, I don't have all that much stuff. My music can be backed up onto 10 DVD's. My photo's can be backed up onto 2 DVD's. And my work related data can be backed up onto only one DVD.

 

[Agent Icebeezy]

I have 170+ DVD-Rs of backup data

 

[Tuvoc]

My setup:

DRIVE C - 120GB
DRIVE D - 30GB
DRIVE E - 200GB (firewire)
DRIVE F - 80GB (USB2)
DRIVE M - 80GB

Drive C is personal data, which I backup to drive E monthly with WinRAR using best compression, in 4.7GB chunks which I also offload to DVD+RW in two sets, with 10% parity with QuickPAR in case one set fails.

Drive D is mostly junk multimedia I downloaded.

Drive E is the backup/video editing drive. I can't backup the stuff I'm editing since it's too huge, but source tapes are always kept in storage, and finished projects are backed up to DVD+R.

Drive F is basically dedicated solely to my Sony Cybershot, and it's full. All photos have been backed up, month by month, to DVD+Rs.

Drive M is my Windows/software drive which I don't need to backup other than the Steam folder, which I've yet to do.

I really can't wait until I can just burn this shit to BlueRay.

I also have another 200GB drive lying around that I'm going to replace the 30GB one with for backup purposes.

I like your setup. I am tres jealous.

 

[lordmrw]

I have 170+ DVD-Rs of backup data

god damn. I have about 2 0r 3 DVDs of stuff I'd like to keep and that's it.

 

[MrPing1000]

I pray to Jebus

 

[aoi tsuki]

In the short term, i'm looking into a 200GB 5400RPM drive for backup, mainly for music and video since my documents and graphics can fit on a couple of DVDs. After i build my next computer, this computer will become my music and backup server, with a dual-layer DVDR for monthly automated backups.

 

[distantmantra]

I have my thesis work on a USB memory key, on floppy disk and I've also e-mailed it to five friends just in case my hard drive fails.

 

[BojTrek]

http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/