1 TB WD External Hard drive and backup questions

[Onkel Neal]

Yay, these things are amazing. I ran out of space on my two internal drives (75GB and 114GB), so I picked up a 500GB Hitachi external drive last summer. Man, didn't take long to load it up with home movies I need to finish that project, then I can wipe it clean again.

Meanwhile, I started getting odd error messages that made me suspect my main hard drive could be failing (it is six years old and runs 24/7). What to do? Well, I picked a WD 1TB My Book. It uses USB 2, it's silent, and I should be able to completely back up both my internal drives.

Question: The Hitachi came with ArcSoft backup (I never used it) and the WD has a trial version of Memeo. So, any suggestions on back up software? Is it worth getting the full version of Memeo? Should I just use ArcSoft for both drives (is it any good)? Why not just drag all the files from C: to a folder in the 1TB drive? Do backup solutuons compress? What do you use?

thanks!
Neal

[Reece]

The best system backup is Ghost, if your main drive dies you just put in a new drive regardless of size, it partitions , formats & restores to whatever the ghost backup was, so if you had a 200gb drive & put in a new 500gb drive just restore & roughly 20 mins later your new 500gb drive is ready & bootable as before, nothing else needed.
What I have is the Main C drive and a large backup D drive that I ghost the images to, can also select "none, fast, or high" compression!

[TarJak]

Yep Ghost is probably the best, but it costs. I've got two WD MyBooks and I run two backups one of the C: and D: drives from my desktop and one of the C: drive of my laptop, plus any large video and game files. I use Syncback but don't bother with trying to backup the XP and Vista or the registry. Just the data. The reason? I figure it is just as easy to reinstall what I need as I need it which allows me to reoganise my HDD if ever I need to do a restore and basically it is the data I need to back up not the software.

I've thought about putting a cheap SAN in to handle media and or software backups as you can get them for about AU$400 now and then it's online all the time. The MyBooks were such a good buy though I couldn't go past em.

[JScones]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

Question: The Hitachi came with ArcSoft backup (I never used it) and the WD has a trial version of Memeo. So, any suggestions on back up software? Is it worth getting the full version of Memeo? Should I just use ArcSoft for both drives (is it any good)? Why not just drag all the files from C: to a folder in the 1TB drive? Do backup solutuons compress? What do you use?

I chose not to be a slave to any proprietary file formats and the like so I wrote my own backup application. Does exactly what I want. One click operation. Couldn't be easier.

FWIW I recommend straight copying from source to destination. No need to worry about proprietary compression/file formats then (remember, you must have the proprietary software installed on all machines that you wish to connect the HDD to *plus* with some proprietary formats if one part of the backup file(s) gets corrupted then you can kiss the whole file(s) goodbye). I can take my external HDD and plug it into *any* computer without having to worry about whether it has the appropriate software to read my backups. I turn the drive on, and my files are there ready for me to use "direct".

Doing it this way may take up more space (unless you 7z/FLAC etc everything yourself, which for the most part I do, again making any backup software that compresses redundant), but the convenience and lack of reliance on any specific software more than makes up for it. Plus, with the new (cheap) 1 and 2 TB drives it's not hard to daisy-chain via FireWire.

Another thing to keep in mind, the first thing you *MUST* do if using Windows is reformat the drive to NTFS. I bought a 1TB WD Home Edition today, and this is the first thing I did, and in the process I blew away all the pre-added bloatware cr@p that came with it. But YMMV...

[McBeck]

Hi Neal

If you need software to take and image of your drive, so you can load it on a new disk, GHOST is really good.

If you want a free piece of software to backup folders and files I recommend Robocopy. It will syncronise and is fast. I use it to keep backup of app 150Gb of data to a network disk.
Bad things: You have to run a script with options to backup (unless you can get Windows to schedule a script?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy

[Skybird]

Using old version Acronis 8 since years to backup my internal HD on an external one. Use to restore a clean system 1-2 times per year. Never a problem, always worked like a charm, always reliable, never any loss.

[CaptainHaplo]

Applications like Ghost are excellent. Ghost itself is the leader of the pack.

The problem with a simply file copy is that it doesnt work out all the time. Since you have the room - don't sweat compression and stuff. Besides - you have been running this thing forever - copy all the data files you want to keep and then when you stick in the drive clean rebuild it. Sure it takes time - but you normally get better performance when you do it.

Course - if your happy with the way it is - ghost is the way to go!

[longam]

Acronis True Image would be my vote, and I was a ghost user for a long time. I also use their Server version at work, really fast.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing...a599ysnrt0aora

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo

Applications like Ghost are excellent. Ghost itself is the leader of the pack.

The problem with a simply file copy is that it doesnt work out all the time. Since you have the room - don't sweat compression and stuff. Besides - you have been running this thing forever - copy all the data files you want to keep and then when you stick in the drive clean rebuild it. Sure it takes time - but you normally get better performance when you do it.

Course - if your happy with the way it is - ghost is the way to go!

So, you're saying just copy the copy of the C: drive to the new external HD? Can that much be copied with a simple drag and drop?

I chose not to be a slave to any proprietary file formats and the like so I wrote my own backup application. Does exactly what I want. One click operation. Couldn't be easier.

Why must you be so cruel!

The best system backup is Ghost, if your main drive dies you just put in a new drive regardless of size, it partitions , formats & restores to whatever the ghost backup was, so if you had a 200gb drive & put in a new 500gb drive just restore & roughly 20 mins later your new 500gb drive is ready & bootable as before, nothing else needed.
What I have is the Main C drive and a large backup D drive that I ghost the images to, can also select "none, fast, or high" compression

Very well, sounds like Ghost is pretty popular, I am going to check it out. I do want some kind of backup system that checks for changed files daily and backs them up on the 1TB drive (gawd, I love saying that: 1TB, 1TB, 1TB, 1TB, 1TB!! ), will Ghost do that? Appears so...

thanks for the feedback, all.
Neal