Backup Thoughts

S

sprayandclean

Guest
I purchased a CD burner for a back up system, but now wonder if a good old fashioned Zip drive would be better.
Actually I dont trust the CD burner, as I cant tell for sure if I'm really am backing up.
 

Jon

New Member
What I have is a second hard drive in a removable drive, copy all your things to it but not the programs.

Then turn off your computer and remove that drive.

No crash, no virus can reach it and when you want to back up more, just turn off the computer again and push in the drive and reboot.

I tried zip drives, I tried burning and neither did it for me.
 

Mike Hughes

New Member
Bates, burn the disc, then check its contents using Windows Explorer.

Also, there are disk imaging programs out there that allow you to easily copy your hard drive (or back it up).
 
S

sprayandclean

Guest
I found an internal Zip drive for my laptop on EBAy, and bought it. That should definitely work, and I dont have another buch of wires and magic boxes cluttering up my office (truck cab).

How do I send a photo to this board/ I have my office complete and operational in the truck , the housing that holds the computer stand and the printer/file cabinet box are even ppainted the same color as the interior of the truck. Ya gotta see this thing!
 

Aplus

New Member
Jon's use of a secondary, removable hard drive is an excellent solution. With hard drives now down to unbelievably low prices, it is probably one of the least expensive routes. A 40gig hard drive can be found for about $75. You'll be able to backup about 70 gig, which should compress down to fit the 40gig drive. Data transfer rates between hard drives is extremely fast, so this would be, by far, the fastest backup solution for large amounts of data.

However, you must be willing to open your computer case and install/remove the hard drive everytime you make a backup image. If the backup hard drive is left connected, or in the case, it is susceptible to the same hazards as your primary hard drive. A severe voltage spike could arc throughout the entire circuitry and toast everything in the case.

Backing up an image of your system to a cdr is also a good choice, but it has limitations as well. For example, most users have c: drive contents that far exceed the 700 mb limit of CDR.

Of course, most backup and imaging software has a compression rate of about 40%, so you can get about 1gig of compressed and imaged data per CD. If you have 40 gig of data, you will need 40 cds to completely backup your system! A top quality CDRW burner will cost you about $100, and the blank cdrs are about 20 cents apiece. Writing to CDRW will cost more for the blanks, and take more than twice the amount of time to burn each disk.

Backing up to a ZIP drive does work, but likely will not be a cost effective solution, due to the number of zip disks you will need. You will be babysitting for a long time inserting and removing zip disks to back up a large amount of data. This is probably the slowest of backup methods.

You could install a DLT 80 gig tape drive, which would allow you to store all your data on one tape. This is the most expensive, and probably the safest backup strategy. However, prepare to spend at least $400 for a good drive, and $40 per tape. Tape backups can run without any intervention from the user other than inserting and removing a tape. Data transfer rates to tape can vary with each tape device, but generally they are reasonably fast. This solution is the business industry standard.

Everyone can make their own decision which way they want to backup their systems, but for me, the winner, based on safety, time, and $$$, is the spare hard drive system.

If anyone needs further info on backup strategy specifics, or hardware/software requirements, let me know.
 
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S

sprayandclean

Guest
Zipperooo

I got an internal Zip Drive off EBAY for $35.00, got the software from Iomega online for free, software 'syncs' data.

Cheap and cheerful. Also all in the same box, no more cables than I have already.

Happy New Year to ALL!!!
 

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