Backing Up Your Computer What do you do and how often do you do it?

[Kubi 0]

To be brutallu honest, I've never backed up my computer. For one, My DVD Drive has never worked, making it quite hard to make a disk over 500MBs. Being 15 I dont have the money to by an external harddrive, and my parents won't get one for me. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll have a job with the district, and I can either get one fromo them, or have the money to by my own.I've lost my computer to a power surge before, lucky my harddrive was in "ok" condition. But I don't wanna take that risk again.

[master_bacarra 0]

this topic is probably the topic that hurts me most of the time. i love my computer and i cherish it even if it's kinda old (like a few years or so). and since it is kinda old, i encounter problems occasionally. i do back-up my files frequently, usually on cd (and copy those cd's like around 16 months later, since cd's lifespan is around that time) but i also send some to my gmail (i really find it useful for storage). but gmail is just for small documents that i need at school, since i don't use diskettes and i don't have a flash disk (oh, poor me).backing up became a habit for me since i encountered the most horrible event in my college life. i was in the middle of doing my machine problems that were due on a near date. my older brother who was about to graduate needed the pc. he wanted to partition the hard disk so he can install linux on it (because he needed that for his thesis). apparently, he didn't tell me that he was going to do that and i didn't know he was going to reformat the entire disk (without even asking if i have important files to backup). when it happened, i almost exploded and cursed my brother after that.

[DjMike 0]

Backing up ur computer is wasteing time.If ur not a lucky man u will lose your data and that's truth,example:I back up my whole system on two dual layer dvd's,i lost one dvd and another one doesn't want to work.After that i buy an external usb hdd that,for some reason,suddenly fall from my hand and break to pieces.It was a very hard time for me ).I was forced to buy flash disk.From now on i copy all my music,documents and stuff like that,that are important to me,to flash.Usb flash disks are good choice,they are small,good protected(encrypted)...A good thing is that i can have all my things in my pocket (cool) .

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

yeah, i as well use a flash disk..i have my pic editing program on there and my FTP client, and all of my sites files on there so if i go somewhere i can get on the computer and work on my site :-D but still a good ideal to back up your stuff in more than one place!

[Flying_Dragon 0]

hmm i usually backup my personal files, my email data to a cd and to my second hdd which is 200 gb (i usually backup the data to two media device(s), just in case if one of the media that I already backup went wrong, heck you never know right? as for the pc's in my office, this goes for the server and also data's on the pc client, i backup it up to 2 device(s) one in the dvd and ther other method i do a cloning to another hdd. that goes for the master cd programs that we have,we backup to anoter hdd in one of our client computer in our lan.

[killerbichon 0]

Use an external USB Hard drive that is somewhat larger than the hard drive on your computer. Then just copy the files you want saved.If you really want to go all out, use some backup software and make an image of your live system. Then if you have a total failure, you can restore and reboot.It is hard to beat an 8.1GB dual layer DVD for pictures and documents. Newegg has recorders for 30 bucks, the discs are like $1-3 depending on how many you buy, and you can take the disc to your bank and put it in a safe deposit box.If you are paranoid, you can make encrypted DVD's with a piece of open source software like TrueCrypt (sourceforge.net has it).

Edited September 8, 2006 by killerbichon (see edit history)

[Danny 0]

I never do backups, unless im gonna reformat and thats just for my bros files lmao, i don't really care for any of my files.

[darran 0]

I hardly do backups unless there are huge screwups within my system or that my system is running too slow because of the number of applications installed in it and the also the number of files I have in it. As for backing up, I guess I have a unique way of doing things. At first, I was burning my crucial files in DVD-RW and then transfering them to my other PC for back up. But then I realise how long it took, and most of the time there is a data cyclic redundacy check which signified the problem with the disc or my drive but I am guessing it is the latter since this always happens on PC rather than other PCs. I switched to using FTP because I do not have a USB hard disk whereby I can just put my files there and transfer to my PC.I configure my notebook as the FTP server and I use a FTP client to connect to the notebook via the Local Area Network and everything is done just like that.

[kdr_98 0]

My hard drive is split in 3 partitions :1 for the system files and programs : backup with ghost (every few months).1 for data and downloads : backup on DVD RW (or external hard drive)1 for the swap file : no backupThis works in most of the cases.But Acronis is getting better then ghost , so in the future I might use Acronis.

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

im a bit dissapointed with some of these posts i think people that dont backup on a regular basis are crazy people. because what if your system crashes because of some virius that the world doesn't know about and you had no back up and yet, you had your senior research paper on it (for my school its a research paper that has to be 30 pages long). that would really suck :Pbut anyways, its your decision not to back up your computers and kudo's to those of you who do back up your computers!

[darran 0]

im a bit dissapointed with some of these posts i think people that dont backup on a regular basis are crazy people. because what if your system crashes because of some virius that the world doesn't know about and you had no back up and yet, you had your senior research paper on it (for my school its a research paper that has to be 30 pages long). that would really suck
but anyways, its your decision not to back up your computers and kudo's to those of you who do back up your computers!

I am sure you are on a misconception at least for me. I believe many of us are talking about a desktop. For me, my desktop is used for playing games and browsing the internet, I do not have any important issues with it. If the games are gone, so be it. They are not very crucial anyway. But if you are talking about school issues, of course there will be backups whether in the form of email attachments, thumbdrive storage ... etc whatever you use. For example for me, I always keep copies of my school work in my thumb drive and duplicate the works I have done in both my desktop and notebook.

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

oh, well thats pretty smart. better than not backing up at all i suppose, lol umm like i said in the first post i back all of my files whether they be important or not on my flash drive and weekley i use a CD-RW disk and make a backup nn that weekly.

[darran 0]

oh, well thats pretty smart. better than not backing up at all i suppose, lol umm like i said in the first post i back all of my files whether they be important or not on my flash drive and weekley i use a CD-RW disk and make a backup nn that weekly.

 

I would not recommend CD-RW because of the experience I have encountered with it. I remembered doing a backup of my personal pictures using a CD-R and while trying to retrieve it, I accidentally dropped it onto the floor. When I tried inserting it in and an attempt to make sure everything was working fine, while transfering it pops up this error

 

Data redundacy check

 

My point is that CD-R are very fragile, any physical damage to it could really compromise the data contained in it and furthermore, during the process of burning, there must not be any movements which could jump the cd-burner in motion. This is why I prefer using a hard disk, it is much faster or an FTP connection to transfer my files within my network.

Edited September 12, 2006 by darran (see edit history)

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

i havent had any issues yet but ibet the first time i do have issues i will learn >_<

[kdr_98 0]

For safety on a system the best you can get is a RAID configuration (RAID 0+1 for ex.)For virusses is this kind protection useless, because all the drive get infected.So the only solution for virusses is using an external device.The disadvantage of CD RW and/or DVD RW is that after you have written then a few times,some places may get write faults on it.So after the backup you should check with the original.All this takes a lot of time, so most of the time I only make a backup of my data.It's not that much , but if you loose it somehow .....And if you are using every week another CD or DVD (even a CD-R with multi-session could work).I know it's a lot faster if you have a file-server in your network or a NAS.But you have also to watch out for virusses on these devices.