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Best Home Compter Backup Solution?

M

MikeHelvey

Member
I'm looking for a backup solution for a laptop (Dell) with between 3 and 10G. Are there any good solutions out there? Right now I'm sending a backup over a wireless LAN....very slow. How about a Zip disk? CDRW? What's a good way to go?

Mike
 
If you're planning to do a backup of files (MP3, videos, etc.), then CD-R/CD-RW is definitely your best option. The media is very cheap, and the drives (if you don't have one already) are also pretty cheap. It can store about 6 or 7 times more than a Zip disk and costs a lot less. If you're planning to do a system back-up, backing up to a CD-R can also work. You can also do it over a CAT5 ethernet network because it will allow you to transfer at 100Mbps, as opposed to the 11Mbps of wireless. I'm pretty sure Norton Ghost will let you back up to multiple CD-Rs, but I'm not sure about Windows backup. Hope this helps.
 
Currently I'd vote for CDRs because they are very cheap, reliable and have a decent capacity (between 640-700Mb per CD). Saying that, DVD RAM drives which can store 4.7/9.4Gb per disc are coming down in price lately.

At present, I use an 8x CD writer to backup about 30 gigs of MP3s and archives - as you can guess it does take a long time but at least everything only needs to be backed up once. For work in progress and files which change often I use 100Mb zip disks and an internal zip drive.
 
An external Firewire or USB 2.0 drive would give you good speed, capacity, and (relatively) cheap cost per MB. On top of that it would be portable so you can use it on multiple computers. Some drives come with a Firewire card (although you'll have to pick one up for the laptop) if you don't already have one. I think the extra cost of the Firewire card would be worth your time.

Drive prices w/Firewire card

Firewire for laptop

And don't forget - to bring cost down you could always get a smaller drive (I think that linked one is 60GB).
 
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