I have got 2x 2TB internal HDD in my PC. One for backing up the other. Was planning to back the whole drive up using SyncToy on the scheduler (daily).

Is that about the best way to go about it?

 

I'm sure I saw some rivals to Apples Time Machine, hourly here.

 

I use the sync toy, and it seems to work quite well. But you should really have a backup of important stuff like photos in another building completely, as to my shame I found out the hard way and lost all my digital images of the first couple of years of my child it is a sickening feeling when you realise this has happened.....

 

It's for this reason I have an external disk in my safe that comes out once every 3 months or so to be updated with pics and videos of the kids etc

If I lost them the wife would string me up!!!

 

I have a separate disk to the OS that all my docs, music and pics etc is on. I use Synkron to sync it with an ext hdd twice a week so I've always got 2 copies.

 

I have an off-site spare internal HDD which was just replaced. It has about 60% of my pics/vids.

I'll have to hold off on an external back up too, what with the price of hard drives. I just paid £100 for a 2TB internal, when the previous one cost £48 not 6m ago.

I'll have a look at that Synkron then too.

 

Wise man once say, unless you have three copies of the data, you don't really have a good backup strategy. A working copy, a local backup and an offsite backup.

 

Any one considering backing their data to cloud service?

 

I've consdidered cloud backup as you get enterprise solution reliability but the cost is still too prohibitive as is the upload time when you have a good 100gb to backup (my actual backup of everything is just shy of 1tb over half of which is my vmware farm) . I'm only on adsl 2+ so that would have an initial upload time of forever

My current solution is working data spread across 2 internal hard drives backed up to a portable 1tb usb3 drive. I then have two further external hard drives, one of which is networked, for taking an extra copy of the most important stuff like videos and pics of my kids which I will eventually get round to moving off site and storing in my parents safe. I will then update those a couple of times a year.

 

I use the Virgin Media "cloud" backup service (in addition to my local backups) - and whilst not the best (it's flakey!) it does seem to work well when it works (if you get me).

As I am on the 50Mb service and therefore have "unlimited" cloud backup storage available - I've got something around 600GB backed up somewhere in Virgins network. Can't complain.... until I try to restore it!

DN

 

You need to perform a DR test