Good evening all, The old XP computers at my parents' business have been acting up a little recently. Given their age (oldest is about 8-9 years old, the other I would guess is 6-7), I get a little jumpy when the machines are not running smoothly. I'm trying to put together a backup solution for them and so far I've figured that the cheaper (and more reliable) route will be to grab a 1TB Samsung F3 and add it to an external enclosure. I'm lost as to which external enclosures are actually reliable and good, so I'm open to recommendations. No eSata ports on these PCs so USB is all I have to work with. Recommendations for backup software would also be appreciated, preferably free soft though. They won't need anything particularly fancy like OS image backups - just a way to help automate the copying of files across should do. The ability to backup SQL Server 2005(I think) databases or Moz Thunderbird, would be a plus if it was paid software, but there are means to do that manually too. Cheers!
backup Hi, I've used a couple of the Icy Boxes without any problems, for example the Icy Box - Ib-318stus2-b is about £25, combined with a Samsung F3 at about £40 will cost you £65ish in total. Icy Box also produce a hot-swap 'mobile rack' version that slots into a 5.25" drive for £20. You can then use a freeware file synchroniser or pay for one if you prefer. Alternatively you can use an all in one external drive, such as the 1TB WD MyBook Essential (WDBAAF0010HBK) which is £68, this comes with WDAnywhere Backup which is a file synchroniser. I am currently on my 4th external WD drive, I have been trading up each time, my current one is the 4TB Studio edition, no problems with any of them, WDAnywhere works fine as a basic realtime file backup. Hope this helps since no one else has come back with a suggestion.
I appreciate the response. I'll have to weigh up the the pros and cons of the DIY and the WD all in one. Thanks!
