Backing Up How Important Is It To You!

Hi Guy's

As we all know with anything to do with IT there are bound to be problems so how do you prepare for the worst , Do you rely on Windows system restore or are you using a online backup system, The amount of people that say to me my system needs a re-format because of a virus or alike but havent made a backup of the precious photos ect so it would be great to see the different procedures people are using to backup.

Its great to see you appreciate the process of backing up is this because of a past disaster or by recomendation Indizine ?

I couldnt agree more, On my personal computer I have over 5000 photos of my family that periodically I backup onto re-writeable dvd but also I have a NAS network storage device that I can access from anywhere and this is also raided so just incase one drive fails the other has the data safe,

I have network storage (NETGEAR STORAGE CENTRAL TURBO) in my office, it contains two hard drives that mirror each other with every read/write of a file. This way, if one of the drives fails I have an up to the minute backup safe and secure.

At the end of the week I make a backup onto an external drive and keep that at home and once a month I make backups onto DVD as a final safety measure.

At home I backup onto a maxtor external HDD plus my documents onto DVD periodically

At work everything is stored on redundant servers (an no documents are saved on workstations) and in turn the data is backed up to a remote data centre every night.

Additionally, all print artwork is backed up to 2 x DVD - one of which is held offsite

How old is your maxtor drive Ray,

About 3 or 4 months I think?

thats good to here as Seagate recently purchased maxtor and recoverd the brand buy using seagate drives instead of maxtor problelmatic ones buddy.

I don't back up, I wait until something goes wrong and then panic. I then always promise to back up but never do :blushing::blushing:

Oh dear Sally surely you could burn a quick dvd with all your important stuff lol

I bought 4 300G Maxtor disks in 2006 - 2 failed last year

Went back to Seagate for the 750G disks - they run so much cooler as well

Seagate Rocks It's all I use after trying all of the other brands.

I'll remember that and buy Seagate next time I need a new one :001_smile:

its two Seagate drives I have running in my network storage. I also rate Western Digital highly.

yes I agree Western Digital are good especially for larger drives the two I tend to keep away from are Maxtor and Samsung.

Can anyone point to an idiots guide to backing up? I've an external drive - I'd really like something that can automate the process but I confess I find it all a bit mindboggling tbh...

its THE most important thing in the world as far as information is concerned.
I use acronis and take a full image of my HDD every week and an incremental one every night.
The images are then automatically copied to an external drive which is backed up onto a remote server.

I'm no expert, but such external drives should sort this within the software?