Backing up my hard drive

[SeriouslySuprCJ]

I'd like to start backing up my hard drive in the near future. My thoughts were to put all the info on an external hard drive in case my hard drive ever fails catastrophically.

I'm wondering, what do you in the know suggest for performing the backup? I know there are two types of backups, incremental file backups (Which mainly just copy/zip files to the external) and then these full images of the hard drive, which I don't understand very well.

What's considered the better way? If I went the image root, is that feasible or would an image for a 500 gb HD be 500 gb big?

[earthbrown]

if you have a DVD burner, that might be the way to go.

Save music on a disk, videos on another, financials on another, etc.

[instrument]

Laptop? Desktop? Apple windows? Etc etc.

[SeriouslySuprCJ]

That seems like a lot of work when I could easily automate the whole process. I'm also thinking daily backups here, just in case.

Edit: Sorry, I should have been more clear. It's a Desktop and it will be running Windows 7 in October, which is when I intend to start backing things up.

[biggestmexi]

raid

[SeriouslySuprCJ]

I looked into RAID, but my motherboard doesn't support it. I know I could get a separate RAID controller, but would that be worth the cost over a simple backup?

Right now here is what I have to buy for my PC upgrade:
- Hard drive (thinking 500 GB should do it, have 240 GB right now)
- 4 GB RAM

So things I might want to buy are:
- External HD (500 GB too? TB?)
- RAID controller, if I go that route

Now truthfully I could probably do all my backups on my older, 240 gb HD so I may not need anything beyond those first two items I listed. If I go RAID of course I'll have to by two identical hard drives.

What RAID level would you suggest? RAID 5 seemed the best based on my research...but that'd take 3 hard drives.

[biggestmexi]

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3087&p=1

look at the raid 1 section

[SeriouslySuprCJ]

Thank you for the link. Do you use RAID right now? Is it supported by your motherboard or do you use a RAID card? If you use a RAID card, is there one you suggest or do you have a rough idea what a decent one might cost? I see a wide range on Newegg.

My concern with RAID, however, is the small slowdown I've read about. I play a lot of PC games and I really don't want anything to slow down my system performance. Do you have experience with this? Is it negligible?

[biggestmexi]

Thank you for the link. Do you use RAID right now? Is it supported by your motherboard or do you use a RAID card? If you use a RAID card, is there one you suggest or do you have a rough idea what a decent one might cost? I see a wide range on Newegg.

My concern with RAID, however, is the small slowdown I've read about. I play a lot of PC games and I really don't want anything to slow down my system performance. Do you have experience with this? Is it negligible?

NO i dont use raid.

I hope for the best.

But the only thing i worry about (family pictures) is on my desktop and on my laptop. and a lot are on CD's but i might burn some DVD's soon. Other than that i dont worry about the stuff on them. And they are on a older IDE HDD as well.

My board does support raid.

As for gaming im sure your game will pull its files from the main intsall HDD.

Or what you could always do is just buy a SSD HDD and use that if your worried about gaming :D

Anandtech has a forum. id recommend signing up there and asking them. I am there as well and asked a Q a while ago and they are pretty helpful and friendly, and more knowledgeable on this than I.

[JustJon]

You don't need raid for your backup drive.

And I would recommend disk imaging. I'd also recommend watching last week's Tekzilla, where they talk about it.

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[JPMNICK]

what ever you do, do not use DVD to backup. they can get scratched or worn out and then your data is gone

get an external drive, and like jon said either image it or just manually select folders. there is a built up backup utility in windows that is pretty good. you can put it on a schedule and have it do it at a set time.

[SeriouslySuprCJ]

Thank you guys for the suggestions. I haven't heard a good description as to whether or not imaging is good for incremental backups, but I think my best bet will be to check out what Windows 7 offers (I have the RC on my laptop), and go from there.

[KnoxHarrington]

I'd actually do two different kinds of backups. A disk image is a good way to recover from a hardware failure (i.e. the hard drive itself has shit the bed), but I'm not sure it's the way to go after a software problem, especially if it's virus/malware related. In that case, you'd probably want to format the drive, put the OS back on, and then bring your personal files in manually.

Fortunately, that's not too tough. In Windows Vista or XP, just copy the "Users" folder on the C: drive. In Mac OS, copy /Users, and possibly /Applications as well. Do that in addition to any other disk imaging you're doing.

[ecobag2]

make sure you have a loud beeping noise on it ...

so you don't run anyone over.

(oooofa that was bad)

[SeriouslySuprCJ]

I was looking over Windows 7's built in backup, and that's exactly what it does. It'll do an image and do whatever files I want it to do. I think that's what I'll go with when I upgrade and see how it works for me.

Thanks everyone for all the suggestions

(And sorry, it won't make a loud beeping noise...I'll have to find another program for that)