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Other Backup Methods

Discussion in 'Software' started by Zurechial, 16 Jan 2009.

  1. Zurechial

    Zurechial Elitist

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    I'm looking for viable methods of hard-drive backup in this day and age of terabyte drives and huge installs.

    I used to use CD-Rs and DVD-Rs for backing up data, but I find that there's too much of a gap between the capacity of DVDs and the cost of blu-ray writers & media for those to be good choices right now.

    My hard drives & partitions are as follows:

    == 200GB Maxtor (I know, Maxtor :eeek:) :
    C: ~190GB ('System')
    F: ~8GB (XP Boot)

    == 320GB WD :
    E: ~320GB (Storage)

    == 2x 1TB Spinpoint F1s in Mirrored RAID :
    G: ~230GB (Storage)
    H: ~230GB (Storage)
    I: ~230GB (Storage)
    J: ~230GB (Storage)

    I use my RAID array to store important stuff for work & uni, games, music, etc; but I know RAID is more of a safety net than a safe, reliable backup, so I'd like to find a means to back up large amounts of data up reliably.

    Also I'd like to find a decent HD imaging tool to backup my boot and system drives before I start toying with new partitions on the 320GB drive for Windows 7 and Linux.
    I've used one of the Acronis programs for restoring from backups where I work (internet cafe) and I found it to be pretty good, but I don't think I can afford to spend €50 on a copy of TrueImage for myself right now.
    Are there any decent alternatives that are cheaper or free?

    Cheers for any suggestions!
     
  2. Diosjenin

    Diosjenin Thinker, Tweaker, Et Cetera

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    There's probably some open-source utility that does that kind of thing (the o/s community should be ashamed of itself if there wasn't one), but I use and like Norton Ghost. It's more like £35, so it's not free, but it's cheaper.

    - Diosjenin -
     
    cpemma likes this.
  3. jbloggs

    jbloggs What's a Dremel?

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    Last edited: 20 Aug 2011
  4. Mister_Tad

    Mister_Tad Will work for nuts Super Moderator

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    Clonezilla is a great drive/partition imaging program, platform independent and free

    The most practical way to backup copious amounts of hdd space is with even more hdd space. a 1TB drive doesn't cost much these days, just pick one it and pop it in an external enclosure and you're off.
     
  5. Zurechial

    Zurechial Elitist

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    Awesome, thanks for the suggestions :)

    I was thinking that, but I've always read/been-told that another hard drive shouldn't be seen as a reliable backup medium.
    I guess that rule applies more for an enterprise/business situtation, so it may be the best option to go for.
    Cheers :)
     
  6. Mister_Tad

    Mister_Tad Will work for nuts Super Moderator

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    It isn't, but a tape solution with the sort of capacity that you're after would cost thousands.

    Tapes are used in enterprise backup because they're extremely robust. You can throw 50TB+ of data in a pelicase (literally throw) and then hand off the case to an offsite storage company and have a bunch of clumsy apes handle it and still know that the data integrity is almost absolute.

    With a backup on an external hdd at home, you're using it once in a while and probably isn't going anywhere, so the fragility of hdds shouldn't be too much of an issue :thumb:
     

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