Hey guys, is there anything in particular I need to look for for the backup drive, I heard that low voltage hard drives are reliable, just wanna make sure
Depends what you're exact requirements are? You mean a drive for back-up that's installed in your PC, or do you need an external drive? The drive itself doesn't need to be uber fast, especially if external over USB. I'd recommend a Western Digital Caviar Green drive. Low power usage, and reliable. How big are the drives you need to back up? Does your motherboard have eSATA? Do you wish to back up just your files/music/documents etc or do you mean a full system back up so you can restore your entire system to exactly as it was? I use a dedicated and fast internal 1.5TB drive to create fast backups initially, then also mirror to a slower, lower power external so I have offsite/portable back ups should the house catch fire Also.. what software you using? I use Norton Ghost 14 and swear by it. It's scheduled, runs in the background unobtrusively, and automatically creates backups without any intervention from me. It also allows you to use a bootable CD to recover from should your system drive fail. I schedule so C: gets backed up Mon, Wed, Fri... and my main storage drive on Tue, thu, sat. I keep 2 copies of C: on disk so I can roll back up to 4 days should I need to, but only keep 1 copy of Storage because changes are made less often to that drive... and also to save space on the back up drives. All this is auto scheduled in Ghost, including the mirroring to the external drive. I am so confident in this system that I will happily format my drives without taking any precautions.... knowing that I can just boot from my recovery CD and restore my entire system, right down to icon placement, themes, and even the contents of my recycle bin from my back up set.
I planing to use esata for backups. my total storage is little under 1tb so i guess ill be needing 1tb. What the difference backing up whole system or just media files?
The difference is that should your system drive go down, you'll need to re-install windows, and all your programs (even if you install programs on a different drive, they still need to be registered and the temp folders etc will be on C ). If you make a backup of drive C: as well using something like ghost, you are making a complete mirror of your system drive than you can restore to put eveything back as it was. You'll not need top spend all day putting windows back on, then your programs, and then messing around getting everything set as you like it. You just restore it all in one go in a fraction of the time. OK if you have eSATA, I'd recommend this, with this inside it. I'd also buy a copy of Norton Ghost 14.
