best way to back up data

unwashed potato!

unwashed potato!

unwashed potato!

Soldato
Joined
12 Feb 2006
Posts
17,576
Location
Surrey
just before i go ahead and buy an external usb hard drive to use as a back up drive for my work i was wondering if people could give some advice as to the best method of backing up data? i've never looked into this before so not a clue if there is certain software people use, different hard drive then a usb one etc?
 
What sort of work is it? If it's documents (i.e. small file sizes) consider one of the online services. Downside is you might have to encrypt your data before uploading if you're worried about it.
 
theheyes: pretty much just small documents though thinking about it there is also large images and .psd files so the overall size is fairly large. i currently use dropbox any way which i consider a kind of back up but that's not for all files as it wouldn't be big enough
 
SyncBack is by far the best in my experience. SyncToy is NOT to be trusted. It has some major (or had some major) bugs to do with exclusions and rules that resulted in data loss. I've tried many of the main packages and sound SB to be totally reliable and trustworth.
 
FreeFileSync is VERY good, it's also very reliable and very fast (especially on USB 2 drives).

I have a 1TB backup drive which I do multiple backups to weekly. It's great!

ffs_sample.jpg


Everything that is going to be synced (using preset or custom parameters) is show after you click Compare, you can then see what is going from left to right or vice versa via the middle column and you can click a row to switch it and so on.

At the bottom you have profiles for certain tasks which you can save, I have my Android phone's SD card, my Lightroom catalogue and then my Documents drive which all get backed up on to the USB drive in order.

The bottom right shows new addition, sync and deletion stats after you compare too and if the sync difference is over a certain % a warning pops up to ask if everything looks OK because of such a big difference.

I've used a few backup software before and this is by far the most in control one I have come across.
 
I too use FreeFileSync. It's an excellent program and use it to run a full backup of all my data several times a week. I have it set up so it backs up everything on D;\ (where all my data is stored) and my desktop from C:\.

It works flawlessly. Love it
 
Mammalian said:
just before i go ahead and buy an external usb hard drive to use as a back up drive for my work i was wondering if people could give some advice as to the best method of backing up data? i've never looked into this before so not a clue if there is certain software people use, different hard drive then a usb one etc?
Click to expand...

You can backup your data with Handy Backup. It allows you to backup and clone hard drives to external disks and sync data between local and external HD.
 
I use Crashplan - the free version allows both local and offsite backups (to a family member or friend's PC), you can also pay for cloud based storage.

Interface takes a bit of getting used to, but it works brilliantly. I backup to my parents PC (and locally to a NAS) and they backup to me. It allows you to seed the initial backup by transporting the bulk of the data on removable media, after which only changes are sent over the net. Retains multiple versions of files too.
 
what's wrong with robocopy already built into your system?

robocopy /e "D:\My Music" p:\Jimmy\Music /MIR /R:50
robocopy /e "D:\My Videos" p:\Jimmy\Videos /MIR /R:50
robocopy /e C:\Users\Jimmy\pictures p:\Jimmy\Pictures /MIR /R:50
robocopy /e C:\Users\Jimmy\Utilities p:\Utilities /MIR /R:50
robocopy /e C:\Users\Jimmy\documents p:\Jimmy\documents /MIR /R:50

just amend and save as batch file, click and away you go!
 
ctrl C on the source, ctrl V in the destination...

free, works well, if you allow it to overwrite all the old data it will also show up bad sectors if the drive starts to fail... (either source or destination)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom