What do people do? (Item in question is a Samsung NC10, so has no disc drive.) I've never backed up anything saved on it, largely because there isn't much as it's only really used for the 'net, but there are some things I would be irritated to lose, so I guess I ought to do something. What?
As ever, I'd rather pay nothing at all, but accept I might have to pay something. Ideally that something will be small.
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What sort of files and how much is there to backup. A simple backup procedure using a flash drive might be all you need. There can't be much on it and 64Gb USB flash drives are cheap.
One option might be Synctoy from Microsoft:
www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=15155
You'd need to run it manually when the flash drive was plugged in. You'd setup a job to backup the files/folders you were interested in securing.
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Thanks.
What's on it? A few photos and bits of video, the odd document. There's a 4GB card in my camera, it'd probably all fit on that...!
By flash drive, do you mean USB memory stick? They're supposed to have a quite limited life, aren't they? They're not designed like floppy discs for repeated rewriting? Or has the world changed.
A 64GB one can be had for between £15 and £30. Does it make any difference? (Actually, I'll get a 32GB one, as it's barely more than a tenner.)
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Or e-mail the stuff to yourself. If you use GMail or some such it'll exist in your account for ever (or close enough for my concerns). Mind you, I'd keep a copy elsewhere as well.
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I'd thought of that, but it'd take forever to upload hundreds of photos, and you'd never bother to download them again.
I reckon with both gmail and hotmail then that really would be 'forever'.
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My backup strategy [personal files]
- Use cloud (Dropbox/Sugarsync/Skydrive etc.) to sync/backup files those I work on regularly.
- Digital photos - keep a copy on computer and another copy on external hard disk [too big for free cloud storage]
- Do not backup system files. If PC crashes will install them from relevant setup.exes [which I keep a copy in external hard disk]
- Don't keep copies of movies. Hardly watch them multiple times - so if they are gone not a problem.
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For photos I would do a proper backup every 6 months or 12 months or something like that. In my case that backup then gets deposited at my parents house.
The rest of the time it is synch'ed with a dropbox, which is free, and guards me against a hard disk loss.
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Buy an external USB disk and configure Windows Backup?
Even fairly large external drives are not expensive these days.
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Of course it depends what you're backing up against.
It is severity (a disaster or a bad thing) and probablilty.
Losing 3 months of photos would be a bad thing. Losing three years of photos would be a disaster.
Then you similarly have likelihood.
House burning down isn't likely, me doing something daft is almost certain.
Which for me translates to infrequent full (absolutely everything) backups stored elsewhere (parents' house) and then more frequent backups kept on another internal drive.
I have an external drive on which I keep copies of things that fall between the two as well as replicating them to Dropbox.
On the other hand, only my computer is backed up. There's nothing on the kids computers I care about, and what little there is on the wife's is copied to mine. If any machine other than mine dies, it'll just be a pain.
There is no point in backing stuff up you don't care about. As someone just said, anything windows or software can simply be reinstalled, you should only worry about your data. And if you don't have any data you care about, then I'd take an image backup once, just to save hassle if it dies, and forget about it.
Last edited by: No FM2R on Thu 30 Aug 12 at 14:58
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You could always look at Amazon's new "Glacier" service - you pay a tiny amount per gig to chuck it up, then a tiny monthly storage fee, then a slightly bigger fee if/when you want to recover anything.
Fees are a couple of cents per Gb or thereabouts and apparently it will soon be available to UK customers.
www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-08/22/amazon-glacier
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When backing up files or not, it is always checking the integrity of the files (a sample) to make sure there is no corruption. Otherwise overtime you my backup corrupt files over good ones. Not only do you need to guard against disk failure but also filesystem corruptions.
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Clickfree backup drive. Worry free backups with no real user intervention needed: tinyurl.com/8ejjyp3
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That's £70! You can backup files for free with little effort. Or knowledge.
EDIT: If there's gullible people on here then in general there's a market for this. Hands off Rattle. :-)
Last edited by: rtj70 on Thu 30 Aug 12 at 22:41
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Backing up a computer - rtj70
