Which remote hard disk?

[Cardiac]

For someone using synctoy to backup new stuff it's irrelevant.

I agree that there's no need to spend huge sums, but even Synctoy (in Echo mode) can rapidly lose shed loads of data if you don't realise that something is gone from the PC before you sync it. And it's easily done if you back up habitually.

As I often remind people, just as PCs make it easier and faster to do your work, they can also make it easier and faster to lose your data. That is why I prefer a second back up alternated with the first.

 

[ian turner]

The default in synctoy is contribute. If you insist on setting to echo then you face the consequences.

 

[Manonabike]

I just bought one after a scare I had this week.

Last weekend I run a scan on my computer and it found a couple of things there, the first file could not be fixed and it belonged to an application that I could reinstall again so I requested to be deleted ..... the second file was a very important driver, the sata driver, and somehow I did not realise this and I also requested to be deleted....... only to come back the following day and not been able to start my computer.

It took me ages to fix the problem and I did some really drastic tasks to get my system back and that was thanks to my new Seagate 1T desktop external drive..... I took an image of the whole drive and then I was able to recover the image every time I made the system worst eventually, I found the problem and managed to fix the situation...... so happy with my external drive now

Definitely worth every penny -

I would say that I went for a 1T 3.5" with its own power supply, £52 from eBuyer, because the 2.5" draws power from the USB and they get slower as they get fuller.

A USB 3 is definitely something to consider seriously, when backing up large partitions USB 2 can take a long time.

 

[Bird Brain]

USB3 is the in thing.

 

[thomas]

Of course, if you are only backing up your documents, you could probably get away with a couple of flash memory sticks. I like the idea of alternating between 2 or more of them because if one fails, the other should still be okay.

Or back up to DVDs if you have a DVD writer?

hmm. actually, to be honest, a 16gb memory stick at £16 from Amazon would probably do the trick for what I want and be a bit cheaper.

cheers for ideas guys

 

[rusky]

What about Windows live sky drive? Not sure I would trust it with anything other than photos but that's just me

 

[ian turner]

USB3 is the in thing.

Might require a PC upgrade to support though.
With the flash drive solution i'd go for a two drive solution as they are easy to lose,easy to break and can partially fail without you noticing until you try to recover some data.

 

[MrGrumpy]

It's well worth using online storage as an extra backup and it's easy to share things. I use Dropbox,which was recommended by someone here.It's excellent.

https://www.dropbox.com

I use BT AutoBackup, as supplied from BT Internet, comes with free 5gb storage, but for an extra £4.99 you can have 50gb of space.

 

[ian turner]

Use online backup as secondary backup. If your home backup dies you can replace it and rebuild. If your online backup goes into receivership then who knows what may happen to it.
Play have this on special offer till midnight if your needs are relatively small.

 

[Fnaar]

All my work going back 15 years is on a memory stick backed up at work and home. All my mp3 music is on memory card of phone, backed up at work and home. All my photos are in the cloud, and occasionally written to cd. Sorted.

 

[thomas]

I'm gonna get a 16gb memory stick. Will fit the vital things I actually want to save, so that's all good

 

[Melvil]

I've got a Western Digital MyBook 1tb and it's connected to my airport extreme so acts as a network disk - apart from fairly slow USB 2.0 write and transfer times and about 10 seconds or so to spin-up when first accessed during a session it's not bad at all. Very handy to have a remote disk I can shove things into (laptop only has 100gb memory tops and I take lots of photos).

 

[ian turner]

Very handy to have a remote disk I can shove things into (laptop only has 100gb memory tops and I take lots of photos).

If you don't backup that drive then you've just doubled the chances of losing a major chunk of your photos.

 

[Melvil]

If you don't backup that drive then you've just doubled the chances of losing a major chunk of your photos.

It's a good point - would mean getting another hard disk (what's this I hear about RAID disks and the like?) but also keep most of my keeper pics on the flickr site below as another backup as well -

 

[ian turner]

Raid is for maintaining up time inspite of disks failing individually but not due to a power surge or exploding power brick which will take out the duplicate (in the case of raid 1) or the parity drive (in the case of raid 3-6) as well as the main data drives. So for home use you're better off just backing up to a second drive. Okay so the powersurge could kick in during backup but then I use a UPS to protect my NAS drive, laptop,PVR against such things.