I run my entire business from my laptop. The company have a server down in London, but it takes hours to down load even a small file, let alone massive drawings.

So EVERYTHING is on my laptop, drawings, photo's, specifications, costs, clients, sub-contractors etc etc.

I'm now getting paranoid about the laptop breaking or being stolen.

I have just bought a 80GB external hard drive, which I want to use to back up all my information.

How best to achieve that? I don't have a regular time in the office when I can set it away to copy all the files across. Nor do I really understand creating a "mirror"?

Any help or advice gratefully received.

Thanks

Mike

Personally I would get a copy of notron Ghost.

It will do a full disk image of your laptop hard disk.

To either CD or external drive.

Regards

Agriv8

Making an image of the whole disk is the ultimate solution, but a simple archive is a start. If nothing else, I'd get a copy of WinZip and make an archive of all the data files (a very simple procedure), which can then be copied off to your external drive. Make sure that the archive verification is turned on when you do it - after the data is compressed it goes through to make sure that the copies are accurate.

If you have the data safe then, in the worst case, all you have to do is re-install the operating system and whatever software you use. You can then unzip the data back in. Your data is far more valuable than the software!

Just one thing - make sure that the backup store is NOWHERE near your laptop at all times, apart from when you're copying data to it! By 'nowhere near', I mean 'locked away in another building' or 'in a fire safe', not in a cupboard in the other room!

HTH,
David

You could also look at hte online back up solutions. You have a constant cost - but they are effective.

Another option is to get a google email account and email your self a copy of everything - means you've got a copy where ever you go (althogh google will not guarentee to not loose your files, they are very unlikely to)

If your using Win XP it has built in backup utility which will backup your files and settings.
Go to Start > programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup.

Follow the wizard and it will create a single compressed file backup of your documents etc. Select your external drive as the destination or just copy the backup from our Hard disk to the external disk once complete.

Rich

I am trying to find a similar solution. I want to back up the operating system, program files, in fact everything on the laptop.
So far I have come accross Norton Ghost at $70 but does not support Vista. Acronis True Image 10 at $50 which supports Vista.

Anyone got any better/cheaper options?

Also, does the external drive need software to enable 'one touch' backup at the end of the day?

Cheapest and easiest way is to use the windows backup utility. read this

You can download it free and it will clone hard disks. Download it and make a boot cd from the .iso.

Danger with mirroring is you could also copy any virus That destroyed your data.

Best way is just regular normal backups, using and external hard drive is good but don't use it as your only backup as they tend not to be reliable, make archives of document directories and settings to CD or DVD media.


Cobianbackup -- uses standard Zip format will back up to just about any medium or location CD, DV, USB pen drive, external hard disk or FTP.

Very good and free.

http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm#Bfeatures

If you are using Firefox and or Thunderbird, you can save all your accounr settings and emails to file using Mozbackup.

http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/

Again all free and highly recommended

[Edited on 3/6/07 by britishtrident]

[Edited on 3/6/07 by britishtrident]

One thing I should have pointed out don't depend on Microsoft Windows backup, Microsoft has a long history of changing the format they use for backups without being backwards compatible -- most recently Windows Vista can't read files made by Xp backup unless an extra bit of software is down loaded.

The other thing Outlook/Outlook Express can't be depended on to hold large numbers of emails, the datbase format it uses to keep control of emails has a major bug that only becomes a problem when it has a large number of emails in one folder -- the solution of course is use Firefox and Mozbackup..


[Edited on 5/6/07 by britishtrident]