What do you use ?

Up until now I periodically copy everything to my External drive but that takes time. I've see western digital have software to back up only updated documents.

A friend mentioned SyncToy I think its called, have you used it and how do you find it?

Do you have to leave the External drive connected all the time or can you periodically connect it and it updates what has been saved since the last time.

I use an online backup service Streamload MediaMax - it's free for up to 25Gb of data. Great if you have broadband and it means you can access your files from any PC.

Having had a bad experience of streamload in the past (losing all my files when most needed) I stopped using the service. Weekly I backup everything to another computer across a high speed gigabit lan connection. I am not a great fan of incremental backups as restoring from them can be a pain, so I just do full ones each time. 100GB takes me about 1hr, which I consider reasonable. I also have an external USB2 HD that I backup to at random intervals.

I only have dial up at home, the 120 GB HDD on PC is full, I have a 320 GB Toshiba External Drive which I have a copy of everything on the PC but due to the PC being Full I'm getting a Western Digital External drive so I can clear stuff off PC and have one External drive as a backup of the other.....maybe overkill but I don't fancy loosing my stuff.

@manny, 1hr seems quick, what kinda drive is it?

@manny, 1hr seems quick, what kinda drive is it?

Just a fast network connection to another computer with a sata connected 250GB drive, the problem with USB2, is its not really that quick compared to the transfer rate the drive is capable of.

SYNCTOY is your friend...

I use it alot to backup my documents folder, firefox profile and anything else valuable to my NAS.. Its better than NTbackup for just getting the stuff you want to keep, and you can schedule it to run every so often to sync files that have changed it also has various options to sync both ways and other stuff.

I just use a batch file with a couple of xcopy commands that copy across any changed files onto my external drive

I just use a batch file with a couple of xcopy commands that copy across any changed files onto my external drive

I guess synctoy is just a fancy GUI for xcopy32... or robocopy.. (im a robocopy man myself)

what are synctoy and robocopy? :confused: I just think 'hmm...have I saved that? no...ok...I'll pop it on my external hard drive'

what are synctoy and robocopy? :confused: I just think 'hmm...have I saved that? no...ok...I'll pop it on my external hard drive'

This is synctoy:

Just means i can keep a up-to-date copy of all my important stuff (emails, documents, pictures etc) backed up to a second location.. be that network storage, usbstick or a external hdd.. its a one-click job.

Robocopy does pretty much the same thing, but its command-line driven.

Ooh, can anyone think of any good names for my hard drives? I used to have one called Jake

Ooh, can anyone think of any good names for my hard drives? I used to have one called Jake

the PC's on our network are called muffy and buffy, the 2003 box is heff and my laptop is betty...

Lol.. the slug is called B0B.

My PC is marmoset.

hard drives are raptor, Max, Sam and sloth, the external drive is fatty.

other machines on this network inlcude:

Thor (teh server)

Mimir

Odin

Helios

HAL

SLuG

E0S

I use Acronis True Image 9 and a standalone partitioned 300GB Seagate HD to save full backups of 2 PCs and a laptop.

Look up RSYNC

I use Allway Sync - it's pretty good

****ing motherboard is after giving up the ghost I think. I tried upgrading the RAM. Slot 1 first stopped working now no. 2 is gone. This ticking noise is coming from PC with the RAM Memory led on motherboard flashing. Why did I bother....Jaysus I hate PC's