Be Excellent To Each Other

I don't have any form of backup arranged for the data stored on my laptop, which includes my entire mp3 collection, so if it get frazzled it all gone, Mummy. *Gnaws fingers*

What is the best means to create a decent backup? Should I burn data to DVDs, or invest in a decent external hard drive (or two)? Which external hard drive is best for under £100?

Show me the world of backing up through the microscope of your brains.

External hard drives; quicker and easier, for both backup and restore.

External hard drive is orders of magnitude more convinient. And quite probably more reliable.

As for which one, there's not really much to distinguish them. (unless eSATA has taken off since I last checked, that is)

I like the Western Digital 1TB external. I have two, in fact. The second one is for films and backing up my MacBook (it rather neatly automatically turned it into a Time Machine). Need to get anoter one for backing up my music, though.

Actually, I was hoping to find a MacBook-sized 1TB, and use that for my music; the external could then be the backup.

External drive all the way! I've just put an order in for a 1TB one following Gaywoods words of wisdom in another thread.

Snap. Well, one is internal. I likes em.

Which, thinking about it, is probably what some people might call "a bit silly". But even if a manufacturing problem does appear, it's hardly going to kill both of them in the space of time for it to be a problem.

Excellenty.

There seem to be a few Western Digital 1TB thingies available. Which one would a person recommend specifically if a person was so inclined?

The cheapest one, tbh.

My two are the standing-up ones.

I really should do this.

I was lookign at NAS boxes again... teh DNS-323 is £99 on Play

Oh yeah, I was going to post this. Crashplan. Can send encrypted backups of yours to a friend's house for offsite backup that doesn't rely on the cloud.

I might have a DNS-323 for sale too, if anyone is interested.

I'd be interested to know how much you want for it.

I could be interested too

Well they are £100 delivered from play.com and £80-£100 on ebay (I think the play.com price cut is new and hasn't rippled down to Ebay yet). It's in tip-top condition, in the box with all the accessories, and I can provide advice on hacking it to install arbitrary apps -- I'll give you a USB image of my last install, with a better torrent client and stuff.

£70 delivered maybe?

I really could be interested..

Both an external device AND on DVDs.

I learned this the hard way when my drive went BZZZZZP CLACK early last year and I lost everything. And when I say everything I mean 9 years of computing stuff. MP3, my photos, videos, documents.. Everything.

Before I left the USA I had about 5 drives in my PC. I have always been a bit 'eggs and baskets'. However, I got a new PC with a 500gb drive in and put everything from the smaller drives onto it and then wiped all the small ones before giving them to friends. Being lazy and too trusting of modern hardware I didn't back any of it up. One afternoon the drive made the aforementioned sound and that was that. Nothing I did would work.

Now thankfully when I was living in Ohio my friend liked my collection of old rave music so I left him all that, so that came over on some DVDs. But I lost years and years worth of seperate songs

I also lost 12 seasons of South Park on Divx, eps I ripped myself from DVDs so they were awesome quality. So I can't emphasise enough the importance of backups, and more than one backup.

I did all my music yesterday, took up 7 dvds in the end. I shall be picking up another spindle full of them on Monday and resuming with my films. Thankfully I always put my photos everywhere so I managed to salvage them.

Go for it Kov.

DVDs weren't a valid backup option in 2000, and they're certainly not now - they don't hold nearly enough information and you can't update (or find) them easily. Blu-ray is better, but only for archiving stuff, not for backing it up.
If you're paranoid get two hard drives and rotate them monthly, or use a cloud-based method (which is best, because then you've got disaster recovery options as well, without the need to drag your backups somewhere else once a week).

Materia slots?

Surely "tent at a save point"?

]

yup pm'd the doc

Can I ask... Am I right in thinking that "backing stuff up to the/a cloud" involves uploading stuff to the internet somewhere?

Yup.

Like for instance, I have an online drive that comes with my virus software.. This could be considered "a cloud?!?"

No, it's in the cloud. The cloud contains a bunch of computers that can talk to each other over the Internet (or, more correctly, an internet).
Here is a picture:

Uploading data takes a frickin' age. Which ones can be trusted?

I saw a cloud once. It looked like father with his belt.

I got my 1.5TB external HDD delivered today. It's formatted as FAT32. I think the first thing I'll do is format it to NTFS as I have a couple of large RAR files that I want to put on it, as well as using it for the CD ripping project.

Apart from not being compatible with older windows machines, is there any other reason to not reformat it?

If you're never going to use it in a non-NTFS environment, then probably not. It will take a long time to format it, though, so I'd set it running and then go to bed.

The "quick format" checkbox is your friend.

I have an unhealthy fear of "Quick Format". It only happened once, and a few years ago, but I bought an internal HDD that was FUBAR. I used Quick Format and all seemed well until the thing died in the hell of bad sectors (Chinese have a lot of hells). Never again.

So, we’ve all ascertained that we need to backup but how do you do yours?

Is it simply a matter of dragging files into a spare hard drive or do you use a program to do it for you and sort out duplicates etc?

I was tinkering with the Windows backup utility that comes with Vista over the weekend. Seems alright so far.. but is there anything better?

I script copies to the home server sat on my network, and they drop into a folder structure that sits inside dropbox.

I have got my NAS (cheers Doc). Now to find some inexpensive HDDs

Thinking of this, any thoughs

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital ... 890&sr=8-1

In the end, I bought this http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitachi-LS-1000-EMEA-3-5-inch-Simpledrive-External/dp/B002TV5JWW which by all accounts seems to be a pretty nice bit of kit. It has blue lights! No, really it looks okay.

What is all this I hear about 'formatting' an external hard drive. What does that achieve exactly?

You have to format a HDD to store data on it. 99% of them will come pre-formatted. Different types of formatting have advantages and disadvantages, but it's probably not anything to worry about. The only thing I can think of is that HD movies are often above 4.38GB, which means a drive formatted to FAT32 won't be able to handle them.

Ah, so. Thanks.

A full format also has the side effect of forcing the computer to write to each sector on the drive, and thus acts as a basic check that a new disk you just bought isn't buggered in some subtle way.

As long as you don't tick "quick format", I think? Apologies if I'm talking rubbish here.

A quick format isn't a full format, so yes.

A white hole?

Racist.

Suddenly "03:27" seems relevant.

my DNS-323 is set up.. will order the 2nd HDD on payday

I can now BT on it and win7 auto backs up....

Will copy my itune stuff over later.