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 ) : 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!
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 -
As you have a maxtor HDD in your system, you could use MaxBlast, which is basically Acronis True Image Home 11, with a couple of minor features removed. There is also: DriveImage XML Macrium Reflect O&O DiskImage Paragon Drive Backup 9 Express ________ Laguna Bay Condos
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.
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
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
