What Is Best Pc Back-up Option, Device, Program Or Software?

Hello all at Yahoo! Answers,
First off, a happy, healthy, prosperous new year to everyone!
May we all be able to help each other again and hopefully find together as many resolutions as possible to any problem, hurdle or issue that may arise in the new year:).
I would like to back-up our computer. I’m not sure what would be the best, safest option. What device, software or program would you suggest is best?
Thanks in advance for your time and suggestions!
Cheers!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 1:01 am and is filed under Device. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “What Is Best Pc Back-up Option, Device, Program Or Software?”

  1. Acronis True Image can back up to external drive or optical disc(cheaper). You can create a bootable rescue disc to restore your whole system if your hard drive goes belly up or “mount” the image to rescue a single file – or anything inbetween. TI has some fancier automatic partial backups if you tend to forget backups yourself.

  2. The best and safest is a RAID 5 disk controller. Then all your files are always backed up. It’s also about the most expensive way.
    Backing up to an external or network hard drive is about second best, but you have to remember to do it every day (or have a backup program running that will do it every day – Karen’s Replicator works well for that, it’s open source and free. http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptre… )

  3. Toms hardware did an article on it recently.http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wind…
    Personally i just put an old hard drive in my pc and set windows 7 to back everything up to it every month. I like it just because you dont have to think about it. I know i wouldnt bother backing anything up if it wasnt so easy.

  4. Depends on a number of things.
    How much Data you have
    How much you’re willing to spend
    What level of risk is acceptable
    How frequent you need the backups to be
    How long you want it to take to recover
    How thorough you want the recovery to be.
    Some of these are related. If you have a 1TB hard drive almost full, backing up to Mozy Online would take quite some time to upload all that data. If most of the data are (for instance) songs that don’t change then Mozy could still be a good idea as you’ll only upload the songs once, and wouldn’t need to be re-uploaded in an incremental backup. If you work with a bunch of files that are always changing than an online backup wouldn’t be reasonable as the uploads would be too slow.
    What if you’re the paranoid type though? 95% of data loss is from user error, 4% is equipment failure, the remaining 1% are catastrophic events like fire, flood, earthquake. If you’re the paranoid type you want to be sure the backup goes to some place other than your house in case it burns to the ground so Mozy again is a good solution. If you think it’s unlikely or it’s a risk you’re willing to take, then buying an external hard drive for backups would over time be cheaper and faster than backing up over the internet, but in a fire your backup goes fwoosh too.
    Are you the type that could rebuild your computer? If you are then you might only back up a few important files from that fancy 1Tb hard drive, the rest you know you could just reinstall. If you aren’t the rebuilding type then you want software that captures the system state like Acronis or Norton Ghost so that you plug in a disk and everything comes back up just as it was at the time of the last backup.