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External Hard Drive back-up software
Jasper - 1/6/06 at 10:15 AM

Just bought a 160Gb external hard drive so I don't need to do CD back-ups.

It didn't come with any software, and what I'd like to do is get some software - preferably free - that will automatically back-up every night anything that has been updated on the PC.

Any recommendations?

mookaloid - 1/6/06 at 11:15 AM

I think windows has a backup utility and I believe that you can use windows scheduler to do this.

I have used both programs before, but never together.

HTH

Mark

flyingkiwi - 1/6/06 at 11:21 AM

Been carefull with the external drive and leaving it on, we used our external 300gb hd as the wireless network drive slaved off the main pc (both kids and wife have laptops, like an internet cafe in my house!) and they stored pretty much anything on it. Movies, games, backups, pictures etc.....

Well this weekend it shat the bed and the bearings seized, knackering the drive and loosing over 200gb of info (yeah yeah, back up the drive! but were do you stop? Do you make a back up of the back up?) I think it overheated but don't know enough about them.

Just my 2 pence worth but keep an eye on it, if it lay's on a flat surface I would think about finding a way to mount it vertically, wish I had done this now as I think it would have stopped it from frying.

Bummer.

Cheers
Chris

Jasper - 1/6/06 at 01:05 PM

Mark - that's great, got XP back-up working and scheduled it....

Chris, I'm only using it as backup, so hopefully if that goes my main drive won't go at the same time. It is sitting vertically with plenty of air space.....

britishtrident - 1/6/06 at 02:21 PM

cobian back up --- nice program, very robust and versatile --- named after the nice guy wrote it--- very helpful guy

100% free software
http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm#Bfeatures

James - 6/6/06 at 06:34 PM

Tape backups stored in remotely located fire safe is the only safe way!


Cheers,
James

britishtrident - 6/6/06 at 07:10 PM

quote:
Originally posted by James
Tape backups stored in remotely located fire safe is the only safe way!


Cheers,
James


I stopped using tape drives a couple off years back. Trouble is a lot of Windows backup tape software use proprietory formats upgrade your PC and change the make of you tape drive and your old backups become useless. Also MS keeps changing the Windows backup format and with Xp has stopped supporting floppy controller based drives.
Zip discs are notoriously unreliable so after being stung a few times I switched to backing up to CDR an awful lot of MS office Documents fit on a CD. I tried CD-RW but it wasn't bullet proof enough.

For creating Thunderbird email backups I use Mozbackup ( http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/ ) which backs up both emails and account settings to the Document directory from whre it is written to CD by Cobian back up with the rest of the documents. Cobian also backs up by FTP to a Linux server.

I has proved 100% effective preserving data through several PC upgrades.





[Edited on 6/6/06 by britishtrident]