What's the best way to back up a laptop?

[phylodog]

My Dell is getting a few years on it and I'd like to back it up before anything starts to go bad. My work Laptop has already started giving me the blue screen of death every couple of weeks so I'm kind of in the same boat there.

I've heard mixed reviews about external hard drives so I'm wondering what the best method is to go about backing up everything on these computers? My personal laptop is mostly photos, tax documents, etc. but my work computer has literally hundreds of man hours of work on it that I don't want to lose.

 

[ArmedProgrammer]

Carbonite works nicely - and there are bunches of similar services.

 

[mrjarrell]

Get a 1 or 2 Terabyte external drive and back up to that. You can partition the drive so one goes for your work comp and one for your personal. It's really easy to set up and they're nice and affordable at places like Sam's Club, (I also suggest getting the Sam's Club extended warranty on it. They will replace the external drive for a number of years at no cost to you, if it fails. And it's cheap).

 

[perry]

I've heard of the 3-2-1 backup rule. 3 different copies of the data (primary and 2 backups), on 2 different types of media, 1 of them offsite.

That's because when you go to restore your data your backup may be bad.. which is ok because you have another copy.. 2 different types of media because CD's go bad, backup hard drives fail, online places can go out of business.. and 1 of them is offsite in case of a fire / tornado / theft.

So, a decent scheme may be an external hard drive, and an online backup company. Microsoft Skydrive is giving away quite a bit of storage for free these days. I use Dropbox. Here is a good comparison of a bunch of the online services. If you don't want to use an online place, then burn DVD's and store them somewhere else.

If your work computer is acting up, you should go get an external hard drive tomorrow and backup the data. You say it's hundreds of man hours of work, so the <$100 the drive will cost you will be well worth it.

 

[Naptown]

Get a 1 or 2 Terabyte external drive and back up to that. .

+1, but go to fry's.

 

[mrjarrell]

+1, but go to fry's.

Fry's is good, but Sam's has them on the price and extended warranty, if you're a member. Same for APC's (which OP's computers should be plugged into).

 

[netsecurity]

Download 'windows easy transfer' and use it to backup everything at once to an external drive. It is built in to Win7, so just run it on the new PC to restore.

 

[iCarry]

Like mrjarrell said, get an external hdd. The easiest way to backup an entire profile is called WindowsEasyTransfer, its a Microsoft product and its free. If you are running Vista or Windows 7, it will already be on your computer. If you are running Windows XP, you can go to Microsoft's website and download it. It is an extremely easy program to use, a couple of clicks is all it takes.

If you purchase an external hdd, spend a few extra dollars and get a usb 3.0. usb 3.0 is 5x faster than usb 2.0 and the next computer you purchase will have 3.0 as standard.

Good Luck

 

[atvdave]

Never keep tax documents on your computers main hard drive... always use a external HD...

 

[Double T]

Put the drive in an external enclosure and set it to read only.

 

[jkaetz]

All this talk of backup programs. If all you want to backup is personal stuff and work stuff, just get an external drive and copy those things to it. Trying to back up an entire system is just a pain. Much easier to re-install applications or restore the system and then copy your data back to it than to make a complete clone of the system. On top of that, if your computer actually dies and you replace it with new hardware, your complete system back up likely isn't going to work with the new hardware.

 

[indybuell]

Get a 1 or 2 Terabyte external drive and back up to that. You can partition the drive so one goes for your work comp and one for your personal. It's really easy to set up and they're nice and affordable at places like Sam's Club, (I also suggest getting the Sam's Club extended warranty on it. They will replace the external drive for a number of years at no cost to you, if it fails. And it's cheap).

+1 here.

I've always been weary of using services like Carbonite that store my personal information in their datacenters. You can zero out the chances of anything happening to your data at another company's datacenter by doing it yourself.

Get an external 2TB drive.~$150. Format it, and write a couple of quick copy scripts to move the data to the drive nightly, hourly, etc. There are a couple of cheap products that do this as well. I actually made the move to a Mac about 4 years ago, and the Time Machine app works great. I push all 5 of our machines to a shared 2TB NAS on our network each hour.

 

[straight-shooter]

I'm still a fan of using Clonezilla for backing up data periodically to my external. Never had a failure to work when doing a restore with it.

 

[indyjoe]

Best way I have found is to install the free XXClone program. Then get a hard drive of the same technology (not sure if it is old enough for PATA or if it is SATA) and a way to connect via USB.

I use something like this: http://www.google.com/products/cata...=X&ei=QUdKUOm1EuLi0gHCiYGgCA&ved=0CIMBEPMCMAY

That will make a 2.5" laptop or 3.5" desktop SATA hard drive into a USB drive. This is great for getting data off, etc.

If yours is PATA, then you need a PATA adaptor.

XXClone allows you to make a clone of your full drive, including setting the IDs required by Windows to make it looks like nothing changed. Then you physically swap the drives and nothing is different except a newer (hopefully more reliable) HD running the show.

I also use Carbonite for backup of the Wife and my laptop. But this only backs up your documents, not the full OS and computer. So if your laptop drive failed, you would have to start by loaded the OS and programs again, then get the documents back.

 

[indyjoe]

+1 here.

I've always been weary of using services like Carbonite that store my personal information in their datacenters. You can zero out the chances of anything happening to your data at another company's datacenter by doing it yourself.

Get an external 2TB drive.~$150. Format it, and write a couple of quick copy scripts to move the data to the drive nightly, hourly, etc. There are a couple of cheap products that do this as well. I actually made the move to a Mac about 4 years ago, and the Time Machine app works great. I push all 5 of our machines to a shared 2TB NAS on our network each hour.

The problem is when your house burns and all your backups are in one location (fire, theft, flood, whatever.) It is trading one risk for another. The only way this works is if you share backups with friends or family to distribute the data to multiple locations or periodically move the data copies off site. Otherwise you have a single point of failure.

I do all of that backup for most of my data ( and is a much higher volume than what I offsite ), but Carbonite is my "everything is gone" solution.

 

[SmileDocHill]

The problem is when your house burns and all your backups are in one location (fire, theft, flood, whatever.) It is trading one risk for another. The only way this works is if you share backups with friends or family to distribute the data to multiple locations or periodically move the data copies off site. Otherwise you have a single point of failure.

I do all of that backup for most of my data ( and is a much higher volume than what I offsite ), but Carbonite is my "everything is gone" solution.

I've thought about this "everything is still in the same location" issue. I'm no tech guy so trouble shoot my logic here.

I have a (? milti) terabyte external hard drive (Seagate goflex home) that connects to my wireless router via a cat5 network cable. I am able to use it to backup every computer in my house (MAC or PC) and access it from any. The drive sits in a cradle, and has a power and Cat5 cable that needs access to it.
What keeps me from all but burying this or making a bomb proof box to store it in in my basement? It just needs to have the one cable and one wire get access to it. The basement is where my office, the router and all that stuff is anyway. If the house burns down, floods, or whatever it will still be retrievable. The cables will have been torched but those are replaceable. I'd love to be able to put it by the front door so it is grabbed on the way out but that plan has holes also.

Thoughts?

 

[Indy317]

I've heard of the 3-2-1 backup rule. 3 different copies of the data (primary and 2 backups), on 2 different types of media, 1 of them offsite.

That's because when you go to restore your data your backup may be bad.. which is ok because you have another copy.. 2 different types of media because CD's go bad, backup hard drives fail, online places can go out of business.. and 1 of them is offsite in case of a fire / tornado / theft.

I have backed up my pictures, videos, music files and a few personal files (taxes, bookmark list). After reading your reply though, I need to seriously consider backing things up further. The two flash drive sticks I'm using were purchased at the same time, at the same place. So if there was an issue with one, there could be an issue with the other one. My handful of personal data files I do keep also backed up on my work system. I make sure to re-upload those files every few weeks. I do separate the two flash drives I have. One is at home and the other is at work. My personal photo and video files are only going to get larger, so I might look into the external hard drive. The cloud services sound good, but I'm afraid of them just shutting down, or servers going bad, etc.. Right now, with just the photos, videos, and music, I would need 7GB. There are some 500GB external drives that aren't too costly.

 

[donnie1581]

I would just backup to an external hard drive. Don't go with any of the Network storage Units. Any of them I have dealt with really suck. Here is a link to some good deals.

External Hard Drive at TigerDirect.com

They have very fast shipping and sometimes you can get free shipping.

 

[mrjarrell]

I have backed up my pictures, videos, music files and a few personal files (taxes, bookmark list). After reading your reply though, I need to seriously consider backing things up further. The two flash drive sticks I'm using were purchased at the same time, at the same place. So if there was an issue with one, there could be an issue with the other one. My handful of personal data files I do keep also backed up on my work system. I make sure to re-upload those files every few weeks. I do separate the two flash drives I have. One is at home and the other is at work. My personal photo and video files are only going to get larger, so I might look into the external hard drive. The cloud services sound good, but I'm afraid of them just shutting down, or servers going bad, etc.. Right now, with just the photos, videos, and music, I would need 7GB. There are some 500GB external drives that aren't too costly.

Actually, if you're going to get an external you'd do better to look at a 1 terrabyte or larger. They're pretty affordable and you can never have enough space. Also, as little as you have (7GB) you'd be able to get most all of it uploaded for cheap with an online service. Google Drive gives you 5GB free and 25GB for something like $2.50/month. The others have similar deals. But, as you say, your photos and such are going to get bigger.

I use a 1 terrabyte external and have everything on it. When we travel I take it with me, so my backups are separate from the home system. The drive's not very big. Sam's Club carries the Western Digital My Books for a good price.

 

[Hop]

A girl at work today just had a flash drive die. Don't trust a single backup device for your data.

I built a RAID NAS and setup computers to backup data automatically. I've had one RAID drive die too. Just swap in a new hard drive and let it rebuild itself. Of course keeping the backups in your own house has it's own risks too.

If you want to backup the entire OS then look into an external boot device with something like Ghost or create a WIM file.