madave Posted July 26, 2007 Report Share Posted July 26, 2007 I have been the victim of simultaneous hard drive crashes (Both my CPU hard drive and my backup harddrive). I feel that DVDs would be a safer choice. What is the most effective backup procedure? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
d_deweywright Posted July 27, 2007 Report Share Posted July 27, 2007 I have been the victim of simultaneous hard drive crashes (Both my CPU hard drive and my backup harddrive). I feel that DVDs would be a safer choice. What is the most effective backup procedure? The most effective is the one that works when/after you have a crash. Now, having two drives crash at once is a terribly unfortunate, and perhaps sinister coincidence. For my part, I run Acronis True Image, and have it set up to back up my boot partition to a separate internal HD weekly. I have 3 physical drives in the hope that both drives won't fail simultaneously. Occasionally (monthly, bi-monthly?) I backup the recent, incremental image files to DVD as well. Then a couple times a year I start over with a fresh image and start a new set of incremental images. Oh yes, one other thing that contributes to an effective backup is one that is easy enough that you do it regularly. Did both your drives fail physically? Or did they both get corrupted? Possibilities of a virus, or power surge? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madave Posted July 27, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 27, 2007 The most effective is the one that works when/after you have a crash. Now, having two drives crash at once is a terribly unfortunate, and perhaps sinister coincidence. For my part, I run Acronis True Image, and have it set up to back up my boot partition to a separate internal HD weekly. I have 3 physical drives in the hope that both drives won't fail simultaneously. Occasionally (monthly, bi-monthly?) I backup the recent, incremental image files to DVD as well. Then a couple times a year I start over with a fresh image and start a new set of incremental images. Did both your drives fail physically? Or did they both get corrupted? Possibilities of a virus, or power surge? Thanks for your response. To answer your question, I am not aware of any power surge or corruption. When my hard dive "died" (for whatever reason), and I went to restore my files, I found that my desktop backup hard drive had also "died". Reason unknown, but in both cases it was physical. Since I have purchased a new PC with a DVD writer, I will be only using that as my backup. My question is: although I have the Drive plus Roxio software, I was wondering how exactly to USE that software. I am clueless, and there don't seem to be any online instructions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
d_deweywright Posted July 27, 2007 Report Share Posted July 27, 2007 Thanks for your response. To answer your question, I am not aware of any power surge or corruption. When my hard dive "died" (for whatever reason), and I went to restore my files, I found that my desktop backup hard drive had also "died". Reason unknown, but in both cases it was physical. Since I have purchased a new PC with a DVD writer, I will be only using that as my backup. My question is: although I have the Drive plus Roxio software, I was wondering how exactly to USE that software. I am clueless, and there don't seem to be any online instructions. Well, I really haven't used the included "Back Up MyPC" (BUMP) software much, but that's the application to use to image your drive. I've always preferred making the initial backup to HD first, and then writing that file (or those files) to optical media separately. That way the initial imaging gets done quicker, and you can burn to DVD or CD as time permits. Also, depending on the size of your images, if they get into multiple DVDs worth of files, it may be better to get an external portable drive to hold your backups. Obviously, there's a risk of the drive dying, but there's a risk of a corrupt DVD too. Hope that helps! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tbrewst Posted July 27, 2007 Report Share Posted July 27, 2007 Personally I'd get an external drive.I used to do my backups onto DVD's before I got my external and they really end up being a pain. Number one you'll have to use multiple discs to make your backup.When this happens then restoring becomes a drag.If you need to restore the image you have to sit there putting discs in and out.If you want to just retrieve a file or two it really gets bad. In BUMP you should just be able to use the Backup Wizard and follow the steps for a successful backup. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marlinsinger Posted July 27, 2007 Report Share Posted July 27, 2007 For true disaster recovery type of backups, I use BUMP and Acronis True Image. Both go to DVDs, although BUMP does currently require floppies. This is for XP, BUMP prior to version 7 does not work with Vista. I do both of these and keep 3 generations, just in case, not so much I am worried about bad DVDs, but that the data I lost may have happened a while back and did not know it. For my data files, I back up to an external hard drive, again doing 3 generations and with both products. As far as creating backup jobs, BUMP is more intuitive than Acronis, although neither is difficult. For BUMP, you can use the backup wizard or just bring up the backup window and create and excute a backup job with those files you want to back up. This is for non-disaster recoveries. For disastr recoveries, just use the recovery wizard. You will nedd th floppies and your Windows product key. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ml Posted July 27, 2007 Report Share Posted July 27, 2007 I have been the victim of simultaneous hard drive crashes (Both my CPU hard drive and my backup harddrive). I feel that DVDs would be a safer choice. What is the most effective backup procedure? It also depends on what you need to backup. If you make a backup of your hard drive and a virus or other problem caused the crash, you could be setting yourself up for another disaster by restoring your hard drive from a backup program. I personally backup only my working/personal files, not the entire hard drive. I think Backup MyPC has the option to backup your files to a disk WITHOUT compression. Anytime you compress data you run the risk of losing data. I did this recently for a friend using Backup MyPC and the process was pretty user friendly. The options were explained as I proceeded through the backup. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brendon Posted July 28, 2007 Report Share Posted July 28, 2007 From a different viewpoint, I keep a very small system drive partition, and install applications to another partition. In XP my C: partition is 7 GB, but has only 2-3 GB of data on it. I backup the whole C: system partition to an image with Ghost, several times a day. It takes 3 minutes a time for XP. I store a week or so of images on my second hard drive, and every month or so burn the most recent to a DVD. This is really handy for me. I can backup the system drive, experiment with software or live viruses (!!) and when I'm finished I can restore C: in three minutes with not a trace of my experiments left behind. I use Ghost 8.2, run from a DOS floppy disk, for my Win98, XP, or Vista systems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ml Posted July 31, 2007 Report Share Posted July 31, 2007 That's a good suggestion, Brendon. I was a bit reluctant to suggest that to someone who's had a simultaneous main and backup hard drive failures. That might indicate a problem with the computer itself. DVDs or online storage would give him a backup that doesn't rely on the computer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
REDWAGON Posted July 31, 2007 Report Share Posted July 31, 2007 All good advice. I chose to back up only my personal files (as ml suggested) and back up to a separate 350GB HD on the computer. I use that HD to then back up the files to disc. I also have been backing up those personal files on my computer HD to another external HD. So now if one or possible two HD's go on the fritz, I still hopefully have one left. If all of them go out (God forbid) then I am just SOL. The main point is to pick a good method and BACK UP at least, your personal files. Especially very valuable personal files that if lost can never be retrieved again. Frank....(backup. backup, backup) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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