Backup program assistance required

james_earl

james_earl

james_earl

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Joined
17 Oct 2004
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438
Location
South Norfolk
hi,
I'm about to buy two 500 gb spinpoint hard drives and a western digital 1tb external hard drive as a backup for these drives. Could you recommend a program that automatically backs up the data to the external hard drive or something with equivalent functions.

Many thanks James
 
I use Vice Versa Pro to sync parts of my internal disks with my external one but it's not automatic. There's an MS powertoy which can do the same thing, again not automatically.

You are aware that to get the full capacity of the MyBook you'll need to configure it as a RAID0 array? I wouldn't recommend using RAID0 for backups.
 
Do you need 1Tb? Even if you've got 1Tb internally you don't necessarily need to back it all up, I've got over 2Tb internally but only 250Gb of external HDD, everything else goes to DVD.

I'd be looking at putting together an external drive myself rather than buying one. The 500Gb WD drives that OCUK have on special at the moment are a terrific buy so I'd be going for one of them probably and then looking at something like this for a caddy. It can use USB or SATA if you have a free internal port, it comes with a blanking plate mounted SATA port which connects to the mobo. The only problem is you need to open it up and flip connectors around to swap between USB and SATA.

Obviously if you want 1Tb then 2 of each required.
 
ive just seen lacie do a 1tb external big disk looking one which comes to an almost identical price to what you were suggesting. i really do need to back it all up because due to a double maxtor failure a couple of months ago i lost 500 gb of data and do not want to repeat. I'm also far to lazy to burn things to dvd. thanks for your help i think i know what im going to do now.

James
 
james_earl:

You might also want to have a look at Second Copy 7 to automatically back up data to external HDD from internals.

rpstewart wrote:

The only problem is you need to open it up and flip connectors around to swap between USB and SATA
Click to expand...

I bought this Icy Box caddy a short time ago, I have a 320GB 7200.10 SATA II in it, and I am using the USB2 connection for data transfer, I actually find this rate pretty good, Average read (HDTach) 31-35MB/s depending on which mobo I have it connected to, or I can share it over a network. :)
 
Last edited:
james_earl said:
hi,
I'm about to buy two 500 gb spinpoint hard drives and a western digital 1tb external hard drive as a backup for these drives. Could you recommend a program that automatically backs up the data to the external hard drive or something with equivalent functions.

Many thanks James
Click to expand...

all of my lacie drives come pre packed with there one click back up software, the first full back up took a while but all the subsequent incremental backups have been a doddle and take about 1 to 3 min to do. you can also set it up to back up every hour etc so if you forget it does it automaticaly
 
Does anyone know of any simple free programs like this? Got a 120GB Western Digital Passport as an early birthday present (a friend had her notebook et al stolen from her house, and it suddenly dawned on me that I don't keep back-ups of my stuff). All I really intend to back up to it are my documents, music and a few other bits.

The Passport comes with software, but the niggle I have with it (aside from it slowing my PC down) is that it encrypts the files and stores them in some kind of unknown file format/structure. Would be fine for normal use, but I want to be able to plug the drive into my notebook when I'm not at my PC, and access my files as normal. The Passport's software doesn't allow that.

Basically, I'd just like something that syncs a few specific folders on my PC with the Passport, so that the Passport is always up-to-date. Would be far easier than copying over individual files (or the entire folder all over again).

Thanks for any suggestions guys.
 
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