Whats the best back up medium out of External Hard Drive or CD/DVDs? I dont have the money for an External hard drive yet, maybe in a few days, but i have plenty of CDs lying around, and DVDs are cheap to get hold of. Why i need to know this is i want to do dual boot, but if it goes wrong i want to be able to get it all back.
you could partition yur hd and move all your files etc on thr seperate partition, that way if you screw up the OS your files are safe. Apart from that some sort of HD imaging software maybe, which i know very little about.
Best and easiest backup? Offsite server with a RAID5/6 array of harddrives. An other option is an external HD wich only gets used for backups, but then you still have the danger of physical drive failure (and data loss) and in case of a home fire all data is lost once again. IMHO CDs/DVDs aren't suited as a backup medium because they are unreliable and you can't really automate backups for it (due to the need to change disks). How not to backup: On the same drive (even if it's an other partition). In case of data corruption OR harddrive failure you lose everything (data + backup)
I have the same data on two hard drives in my PC, this is also backed up to a nas and also to an esata drive. Some bits and bobs are also on dvdr's. Glider's suggestion of offsite backup on a server is the best though. It's maintained by some other poor bugger and normally keep a high percentage of uptime.
An online backup server would be an option, but I don't really know an awful lot about them. I have plenty of servers around the globe to make a pretty decent backup network. Chances are slim that Belgium, The US (New York & Aspen), Holland, Slovakia & South Africa disappear from the face of the earth all at once. And even if they do, I'll probably won't need my data anymore
I've also been looking into a similar situation, my solution for photos is to get a small external hd and take it to the office (off site) and only bring it home once a month or so to back up photos. For other files there are a few free/cheap solutions on the web for home/personal use but i wouldn't back up more than a few gb this was it would ages to backup and subsequently restore. I haven't used one so can't recommend any but google will see you right.
At my work we use Memeo Auto backup Pro. We have HDD in the pc thats got all are files on it and then a 2nd external HDD that has a backup copy of all the files. The software back ups your files on its own and its nice and easy. Me on my home PC i just have 2 HDDs that have a copy of all my files on them. Plus i burn a copy of my files to a DVD just so i can have a copy on disc if i need to take a file to sumone.
You could put all the 'big' stuff (music, movies, pr0n, disk images) on DVDs - they don't need to change. Then you could try and persuade a friend or two who have a 'server' to run something like rsync or even FTP and you can back up the small files using that. I suppose it depends how much stuff you need to backup at a time. In my case, once I take out all of the big stuff mentioned above, I barely have more than a couple of hundred megs of things that have changed at any one time - mostly config files, etc. It's no problem to bzip them and stick them on a usb stick or upload somewhere safe. Then again, if you're a video editor and you have 1 TB of stuff to back up per week, my method falls over rather
Back to the OP's original question. If you have the money then online backup server is the way to go. I didnt suggest it as you said you didn't have the money for an external HD so i assumed you wouldnt have the money for a commercial online backup. If anyone has any free recommendations then I'm sure he would appreciate them.
I remember when I first implemented dual boot I backed up all essential data to DVD's - a right royal pain in the @rse that was too so I wouldn't recommend that route unless this is a one-off until you are happy that you haven't lost all your data in the move (if you are going for Linux I can vouch for dual booting with Kubuntu but would suggest you defrag your drive before you start and know what Linux partitioning you plan to implement). I don't know much about online backup solutions and for some reason I'm slightly suspicious of them, besides I've got about 100GB to backup so I don't feel this is a practical solution even with a very fast broadband connection. I'd consider something like this as a minimum: - one drive for operating systems, program files - second drive for data - add an internal or external drive and backup to this At least this solution offers some redundancy which is a lot better than nothing and it's relatively cheap. I use an external USB drive which is a bit slow but has the added benefit of portability. For backup software I'm using Comodo Backup, it's free and I can set it to backup at night and run a script to shutdown the PC when it's finished. Job done. There are probably better free backup utilities out there but this seems to work for me so I haven't bothered to look for an alternative.
