Backups...What's best hardware?

[Pete1]

I have this fear of my hard drive crashing and losing everything. I have 5 gigs of folders/files on a 38 gig hard drive. WinMe loaded. If hard drive crashed I guess I would have to load WinMe from Dos, and then load rest of backups, because most backups work from Windows. Do I just backup folders and files and reload all applications manually? Can I backup the entire drive for safety and load from Dos? I am not use to backup programs so please excuse my ignorance.
Any feedback on good backup software and/or which is better, tape drive or CD-RW disks would be appreciated.

[sharder8]

I use NovaDisk for my back-up program. As far as whether to use tape or CD RW, at less than .50 cents a disk for a CDR and less than $1.00 a pop for CD RW, with no additional hardware to buy, I have 2 sets of CD RW's that I alternate.

If you don't have a tape or burner, I would go with the burner for the many other things you can use it for.

[Pete1]

Sharder8, can you tell me what you backup. Files only or whole hard drive?
Thanks

[jmorrell]

I use Drive Image 4.0 to create an image of my entire hard drive (about 1.5gb of applications and 4.5gb of mp3's) and write the image to CDR's/CDRW's. Have backed it up twice: once on CDR, once on CDRW ( so I can reuse the disks). You can restore the complete hard drive by booting and running Drive Image from floppy disk. You don't need to reload any software on the hard drive to run the program. Norton Ghost can do the same thing.

[sharder8]

Pete1 --

I normally back up the whole hard drive. With compression on, it is taking 5 CD RW's right now for aprox. 3.26GB.

You can also set it to do only specific files or folders as well.

[ziggie]

I would use Ghost to backup, copy partitions or clone HD's.......it's great and easy.

ZiGGie

[Fudge]

If yer that worried about it why don't you just buy a second harddrive to back it up on?
I mean if you only have 5 gig to back up then you only need like a 10gig harddrive.
Just a thought, but to buy a 10gig harddrive, would be cheaper than buying a burner. At least here in Canada it is anyways.
Then I would just use a program like Norton Ghost to make an image every couple of days.

Just my two cents...Fudge

[sharder8]

Good question Fudge --

Simple truth is my system had a burner! I had it built with one. I have a 20.5GB HDD and I currently don't have the funds to buy a second HDD. When I do get the funds (after buying a new printer and scanner) I'll buy a new HDD for the kids computer and take the 4.2GB HDD out of theirs and put it into mine for backing up. The kids usually get my left-overs, but I'll give them the new HDD. (It only cost me $99 for a 8-4-24 Yamaha CD RW when I had my system built last May.)

[Fudge]

I guess I'm just a bit spoiled. I have 3 hard drives AND a burner (the same...yamaha 8x4x24), so I essentially have the best of both worlds. I guess it's a personal choice. I mean a burner is better because of the versatility (burning and such), but a second hard drive is just soooo much easier and faster. PLUS, with a second hard drive and Ghost, you can make a hot swap hard drive OR an image. I go the hot swap route, as I hate down time and the "getting back up" time.

[linux_guru]

The absolute "best" hardware for reliable backups is a DLT (Digital Linear Tape) drive. These suckers can hold 80 Gb (compressed) and have a guaranteed life of 20 + years. You wont get much change from $5000 tough. If you cant afford one of these, a DDS-4 is a reasonable substitute, and can hold 24 Gb (comprssed) & 1/2 the price.

[RobRich]

I'm lazy concerning backing up my primary desktop, so I simply mirror a copy of my drive to another identical drive. I just added extra storage to my home network's server, so I will likely start backing up all of my systems' critical data to a dedicated backup drive at the server.

Surprised none mentioned a RAID 1 configuration for optimum data integrity and backup purposes.

Later,
Robert Richmond

[socalgal]

I use a second hard drive slaved to the master and clone my entire drive to it.

Have been using Drive Image Pro 4 and now using Ghost 6.5.

[canit]

Call me paranoid but I use multiple backups. I still use floppies(yeah I know but they're cheap an easy to carry), CD-R/RW(I think this is the best medium for me right now), Sy-Jet 1.5GB(still works so might as well use it) and online(I like the idea of having family photos at a remote location in case the pc's are stolen or the house burns down).