Ugh, best/easiest way to backup?

Se7ven

Se7ven

Se7ven

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Hey guys I am selling my PC including the hard drives and I have a load of data which I want to keep before formatting and giving the comp to the buyer.

but its not just a small amount of data, there's **** loads that would take weeks to burn onto discs.

what do you suggest the easiest way to back up the stuff would be? USB drives? a cheap external hard drive?

thanks
 
Price is relative, get a drive that is big enough for your data with some spare left over for future back ups.
 
cheap drives are athing of the past as almost all hdds are cheap now.
 
Khaaan! said:
cheap drives are athing of the past as almost all hdds are cheap now.
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Too true, remembering going nuts over a 540mb hdd and wondering what in the world was just eating up all the space.................:eek:

What's a TB, is it a jab, dose it involve needles.................
 
I remember backing-up about 800gb on 700mb CDs . :rolleyes:

Then I got my first 1TB drive and all of those discs became useless and that time/money spent for nothing. Good times. :D

Now I've two complete back-ups; one on that same 1TB drive and another on some blu-rays and DL DVDs. :cool:
 
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Heck no. if it's a lot of data he'll be there and a day forever. even let's say a DL is 8GB, 10 for a 80 GB backup, which is small. Especially if like me he's got large amounts of pictures and video (PSD's and premiere video files for work).

Better is burn the most important stuff and also USB it too.
 
Could you do it the other way round, i.e. buy a new HDD and put that in the PC, reinstall windows onto that, then just keep your HDDs with all the data on?

Would mean there'd be no tiresome data copying plus there's zero chance of them getting hold of any personal data!
 
Brian8bit said:
DVDs. Even cheaper than external drives and not liable to crap out on you at some point losing all your yaoi porn.
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ERrm, dvd/cd/blurays, they most certainly do go bad and also are horrible for trying to find the one file you want. Mostly people don't go and list every file in pen on the dvd, yes in theory its great to make a list of everything in a text file as a directory and list the dvd's by group of files, 10mins to burn a dvd for 4gigs, even a 500gig drive you want backed up would take 125dvd's(which you have to store somewhere) and 21 hours straight of burning. This is again ignoring the fact the data can indeed go bad, I've had LOADS of old cd's and dvd's go bad, and if you buy the very very highest quality dvd's it stops being as cheap and they can still go bad after several years. The types of dvd you buy, with films or whatever else on are on a different level of reliability/burning/printing to what you get at home.

Screw that, a 1tb drive, sorted, sometimes its just worth sticking old drive in new comp as a back up and keep old data, but then you just end up with a dozen 120-500gb drives over several years, buy the biggest drive you can afford, right now a 2TB drive at £90 is about as good as you can do, stonking value, quick and easy, copy everything you need over, wipe the old drive, if you're worried about people finding your old data, use one of the data destroying apps that writes random data several times over so you can't find the old files.
 
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OCdude said:
Could you do it the other way round, i.e. buy a new HDD and put that in the PC, reinstall windows onto that, then just keep your HDDs with all the data on?

Would mean there'd be no tiresome data copying plus there's zero chance of them getting hold of any personal data!
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Yeh but he can't just stick old hard drives in a new PC.
 
I stopped backing up on DVDs now. It's simply not big enough and it takes up way to much room when you start having spindles of the stuff and takes too long to access them.

I got a 2TB drive this week, 2TB !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
Copy/Paste to a couple of external HD's and also backup any core data to the cloud. I find Dropbox excellent and it removes the single point of failure many have with backing up to one device.
 
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