Best way to backup PC?

S

SegaRob

Veteran X
I have a 500gb HD and bought a 2nd one to use as a backup. What's the best way to backup? Setup a RAID? Use Norton Ghost? Something else?

I've always been too lazy to do full backups but I figure it's probably a good idea in case one HD craps out.
 
And what if your "back up" craps out?


Unless you have "sensitive" info.......put it on the "cloud"

or burn a CD of some of the stuff you gotta have.
 
the cloud?

It would be unlikely for both HDs to die at the same time (unless there was like a fire or something).
 
Are they the same hard drive, and did you buy them at the same time? If so it's far, far more likely that they both die at the same time. RAID 1 will simply mirror information if both HDD's are the same size. Norton Ghost creates an imaged backup that will usually be about the size of the data you have stored on your drive, but you'll have to manually image it every time you feel you need a backup.

Take your pick :shrug:

I'd still recommend storing really important documents online or with more redundancy.
 
Lineage said:
Are they the same hard drive, and did you buy them at the same time? If so it's far, far more likely that they both die at the same time. RAID 1 will simply mirror information if both HDD's are the same size. Norton Ghost creates an imaged backup that will usually be about the size of the data you have stored on your drive, but you'll have to manually image it every time you feel you need a backup.

Take your pick :shrug:

I'd still recommend storing really important documents online or with more redundancy.
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Same size, different brand, bought at different times.

RAID seems better since I don't have to manually backup periodically. Isn't there some performance benefit too? How can I setup a RAID 1?

What is a good online backup service?
 
Acronis TrueImage has worked well for me in both home and pro settings. It is also great if you do tech support for your family and friends.
Burn an image to DVD and set up another image on the hdd. You can also have it do scheduled incremental backups.
Seems like Newegg had it on sale today for $29 with a $20 mail in rebate.
 
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RAID 1 does'nt offer a performance boost, it actually slows down performance because it has to do double writes. If you want to buy more hard drives then you can set up RAID 0+1 which would offer a small performance boost.
 
You can try a software RAID setup. All my RAID experience is with Linux systems, so I can't help you on that front. My recommendation is for software RAID, as opposed to Hardware. If you don't want to take as many hits on your CPU cycles, you might want to keep seperate OS/install and data drives and only run a RAID on your data drives.
 
Lineage said:
Are they the same hard drive, and did you buy them at the same time? If so it's far, far more likely that they both die at the same time. RAID 1 will simply mirror information if both HDD's are the same size. Norton Ghost creates an imaged backup that will usually be about the size of the data you have stored on your drive, but you'll have to manually image it every time you feel you need a backup.

Take your pick :shrug:

I'd still recommend storing really important documents online or with more redundancy.
Click to expand...

I tol im dat!
 
I use RAID 1 and an external backup of just data. RAID 1 offers a read performance boost but a write performance hit. Hardware RAID > Software always. Software raid uses
CPU but finding a proper hardware SATA raid is expensive. I use my onboard AMD controller which is software.
 
What's the difference with all these different RAID types? Do I need more than 2 HD?

Are there any good/cheap online backup services?
 
SegaRob said:
BTW acronis has poor reviews on amazon: Amazon.com: Acronis True Image Home 2010: Software

What's the deal?
Click to expand...

their past versions have had some shitty problems.

i had one not open. said it was corrupted, even though it validated fine. their customer support sucked a giant dick. 3 months of them playing with it and nothing. they'd use citrix to look at our screen and just restart services and play with the mouse for 10 minutes then go 'i don't know'.

stupid fuckers i can restart services myself. they were utterly useless.

that said, the newer version works much better.
 
Why do we keep having variants of this thread, over and over again?

If you're just worried about a hard drive dying, you don't need a full mirror or system backup. You can tolerate the inconvenience of a reinstall, so just use a within-Windows backup of your important files.

There are quite a few programs out there that will also allow full-system backups of a running Windows instance. DriveXML is the only free one that I've used and could recommend.

Full-system backups of a Windows install that isn't booted is really trivial. If your hardware is supported, any linux boot disk plus ntfs-clone will easily make an efficient copy of your system.



With very few exceptions, any RAID except 1 has no business in the home. And good software RAID is better than average hardware RAID because CPU cycles are cheap, reliable, and don't need a $500 redundant controller card sitting unused in a drawer for security.
 
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