best, efficient way to backup 80GB harddrive

[faye]

Hi, right now using a WD800JB 80GB harddrive... only 50GB is in used...

and i want to backup "most" of the data... like Documents, projects, videos, audios except cache(IE)...

what is the most efficient way to backup the data...??

i have a 8x4x32x burner, so it takes quite awhile to burn a 700MB cd(about 15 to 20minutes)

should i buy a lower end harddrive to back them up?

ps.. my hd is working extremely fine and fast right now , but just incase it suddenly died. like my old one...

thanks

 

[faye]

ttt.

 

[mcveigh]

how bout a big enough hard drive in an external enclosure?

use firewire or usb2.0
external enclosure about $50
usb2.0 card about 25

plus cost of hard drive.

 

[Peter]

Do you want to archive, or backup? The former is best done on optical media, piles thereof.

Backup, if it shall be of any value come Restore Day, needs several sets of backup data, at least three. If you're going to do backups frequently, you want to look into using tape drives. Onstream makes nice ones up to 120 GBytes (compressed) that should do - if you're lucky then even their cheaper 60 GB (compressed) drives will do. IDE, USB, SCSI , FireWire attachments available, internal and external drives.

 

[Maki]

A big drive and norton ghost with high compression is your friend. Ghost to an image. Just grab everything and cycle through a couple backups.

Otherwise, Retrospect backup is nice even if it does have an irritating interface.

Nova Stor failed me the only time I needed it.

Can't stand windows backup.

DVD burners are probably the way to go. But even so if you have a lot of data it will take a lot of DVD+rw's. ($$)

I'd just burn what I want to archive to disk as it needs archiving. Then I'd have one or two seperate disks that I do norton ghosts to. This is, in fact, what I do.

Other options are to run a backup program like retrospec and have it dump the backups to a second (removable, usb, whatever) hard disk. That way you only backup what you want and not the full system.

I also like backing up to a second drive and then archiving the backup files to CD at a later time. (DVD, whatever.) That way you have the backup done with little fuss. And you can move it to CD at your convienience.

But I recommend ghost with a big second disk in a external case or pull out tray.

 

[Peter]

Note that with just one physical backup media, you basically have nothing. Imagine the work drive fails DURING backup. What then? You just erased your only backup set to make room for a new one ...

 

[Maki]

You don't ghost disk to disk. You ghost disk to image. With a bigger destination disk and compression you can usually fit a couple of backups on your second disk. Alternately you can use two backup disks and do a disk to disk copy. Just alternate the backup disks.

A nice way of helping this along is to partition your main disk so that you have your OS (if you want that backed up) and all your "I care about this" data on that partition. Then you make a seperate partition of stuff you can easily replace. (MP3's that I've ripped. Games. Stuff like that.) So you take your 80G disk and break it up into a 50G and a 30G partition. Then you just need to ghost the 50G partition. If your destination drive is an 80G drive you should be able to fit two images on to that disk with only the minimal amount of compression. And that assumes that the source is full.

In my case I have a 40G partition that I'm backing up to a second 80G drive. With some 25Gs used on it I'm able to get about 4 or so images to the backup disk.

If my backup disk fails I'm simply running without a backup. If my source disk fails I only lose the image (should be the oldest) that I'm writing to. I buy a new disk and restore. Boom. Done. In the first case I buy a new disk and start ghosting.