Best way is to have a slave drive. Another hard drive on your computer to backup your important files and dsocs and pics.
There are many alternatives, and free too. If you want to check them all out. The best place I know of to see what is out there is donationcoder.com, and in the search box just type in 'sychronize' or 'backup'.
You will get a whole lot of options, both free and paid for.
You can also backup to online services which are plentiful.
You can search for them as well.
Personally, I keep everything I need in different folders in My Documents.
So all I have to do is backup My Documents and reload my operating system.
You just have to play with them to which you like and hoe they work.
GoodSync can be set on a schedule, which has it's good points.
To manually sync is something to remember with the free ones.
Obviously I like the sync programs better then backup programs.
Just because I'd rather start with a fresh install of the OS and still have my important work. Rather then incremental backups of which you may have no idea of when the problem started and where it's hidden.
I use Foxmarks add on for Firefox which is available for IE7 now as well, and I have web based mail, although I back that up to My Documents too.
Having online services is a good idea too, but you are not in control of their servers, which can and have lost data. Of course another drive could fail too. So doing both is a good idea.
Online services will be in those search results as well as backing up to your own drives. And plenty of well informed users as well.
The method Cman suggested of keeping everything in your MY documents is excellent. IT also affords the opportunity to just copy it over to a memory stick.SO once a week you would just copy it over it only takes a minute
OR as often as you felt it needed to be done.
be sure to get at least a 4 gig stick.
Pictures tack up a lot of room
you also might want to keep your photos on a separate memory stick from your document stuff or even keep them on one of those free or paid online services like Photobucket.
Edited to add
wiping a hard drive and reloading software is not that difficult but it is time consuming.. for a novice plan on about 6 hours of including rereading instructions and turning on and realizing you still needed to load a few more drivers.
Yeah, good idea, leafy, I didn't think of a usb stick. They are a lot cheaper then buying another hard drive. If you don't have one. If you have more then one computer, you can copy/sync'/backup to it through your network setup, through 'network places'.
Online services such as photobucket and flickr and picasa will work for pics. As for the rest of the data needed to be backed up, there are a few options. Of which I only will show the free ones.
Reliable but not automatic, and it will not detect what files you have already put on adrive, which means if you backup the same folder again because of new files added, you will have duplicates of the files that were already on adrive. It's a bit slow and tedious to use but works and 50gb free is a major advantage to this service. 1000 file upload limit at a time, of course you can upload again and again as long as you have not reached the 50gb limit.
It's really a question of what you want to spend. And by spending, that combination of time or money. There are plenty of places to put data nowdays, up on the internet. And lots of ways to put data on a disc or a stick. There are USB hard drives that are going down in price, an alternative to a USB stick. If you have a DVD player on your PC and it is Double Layer, you can get around 8 gigs per disc on that (DL discs are what a buck or a buck and a half a disc). If you are going to blu-ray on your computer, you can put a lot of data on a blu-ray disc, you would need a blu-ray burner, I don't know the exact capacity of Blu-ray discs, but am thinking like 25gig. If you have really critical stuff, then you go to a Raid array. Like cman, I believe has mentioned, an extra drive is always a good idea, I bought a 1T drive (1,000gig) for like 129 or so a few weeks ago. What I would also look into is imaging software, it does a bit by bit copy of a drive, sort of the same idea as those discs you get when you buy a pc, "recovery discs"...here you are taking a snapshot of the whole drive with all your stuff, plenty of this type of software out there...many drives, like in buying a new backup drive have the software included with a new drive...regrds..michael
Flash drives still are not big enough, unless you only keep a collection of documents. Which if that is the case, flash drive with a auto sync to keep your "My Documents" up to date on your flash drive works great. (Windows Backup always worked for me and comes free with your PC, along with a scheduler to schedule how often and when ran).
But for many, who keep videos and music, that 32gb flash drive won't hold much.. And most backup now days are Hard drive to hard drive. Which is where HDD docking stations have come into play in the last few years. Just go buy a 1TB hard drive and a docking station that costs $35, and you can image your entire computer for free. Free Imaging software suggestions - Selfimage or Driveimage XML...
Depends how much and how often you need. Flash drive for small jobs, Hard drive docking stations for large.. Microsoft Backup for small or predictable files, imaging for large 100% dependable!
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cman
Best way is to have a slave drive. Another hard drive on your computer to backup your important files and dsocs and pics.
There are many alternatives, and free too. If you want to check them all out. The best place I know of to see what is out there is donationcoder.com, and in the search box just type in 'sychronize' or 'backup'.
You will get a whole lot of options, both free and paid for.
You can also backup to online services which are plentiful.
You can search for them as well.
Personally, I keep everything I need in different folders in My Documents.
So all I have to do is backup My Documents and reload my operating system.
I use GoodSync Pro-
http://www.goodsync.com/index.html
which is about $30, it can backup to any drive or network place in your system. A good free one is FolderSync-
http://www.saleensoftware.com/FolderSynch.aspx
You just have to play with them to which you like and hoe they work.
GoodSync can be set on a schedule, which has it's good points.
To manually sync is something to remember with the free ones.
Obviously I like the sync programs better then backup programs.
Just because I'd rather start with a fresh install of the OS and still have my important work. Rather then incremental backups of which you may have no idea of when the problem started and where it's hidden.
I use Foxmarks add on for Firefox which is available for IE7 now as well, and I have web based mail, although I back that up to My Documents too.
Having online services is a good idea too, but you are not in control of their servers, which can and have lost data. Of course another drive could fail too. So doing both is a good idea.
Online services will be in those search results as well as backing up to your own drives. And plenty of well informed users as well.
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cman
I meant to say, search the forums of donationcoder.
Although donationcoder itself has much software.
I don't believe there is any backup software.
http://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php
Discusses many of the programs at these sites.
Each of these have their own search box.
Keywords to search would be-
backup
sync
synchronize
image
partition
All these programs on these sites are free, free for personal use,
or a free version versus a pro version which would cost a little.
http://elitefreeware.blogspot.com/
http://www.freewaregenius.com/
http://www.ghacks.net/
http://www.nirmaltv.com/
also their is this drive imager
which i'm sure is mentioned in these links
http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm
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cman
if you got lost in all those links
this is one of the best
http://www.techsupportalert.com/free-titan-backup.htm
typical of many softwares
is too make the older version free upon release of a newer version
titan 1.5 is very good and works
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leafytwiglet
I thought I would add this
The method Cman suggested of keeping everything in your MY documents is excellent. IT also affords the opportunity to just copy it over to a memory stick.SO once a week you would just copy it over it only takes a minute
OR as often as you felt it needed to be done.
be sure to get at least a 4 gig stick.
Pictures tack up a lot of room
you also might want to keep your photos on a separate memory stick from your document stuff or even keep them on one of those free or paid online services like Photobucket.
Edited to add
wiping a hard drive and reloading software is not that difficult but it is time consuming.. for a novice plan on about 6 hours of including rereading instructions and turning on and realizing you still needed to load a few more drivers.
Edited by leafytwigletLink to comment
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cman
Yeah, good idea, leafy, I didn't think of a usb stick. They are a lot cheaper then buying another hard drive. If you don't have one. If you have more then one computer, you can copy/sync'/backup to it through your network setup, through 'network places'.
Online services such as photobucket and flickr and picasa will work for pics. As for the rest of the data needed to be backed up, there are a few options. Of which I only will show the free ones.
http://www.adrive.com/
Reliable but not automatic, and it will not detect what files you have already put on adrive, which means if you backup the same folder again because of new files added, you will have duplicates of the files that were already on adrive. It's a bit slow and tedious to use but works and 50gb free is a major advantage to this service. 1000 file upload limit at a time, of course you can upload again and again as long as you have not reached the 50gb limit.
http://www.syncplicity.com
http://www.getdropbox.com
These two are limited to 2gb unless you buy more space.
I use them both. Each is unique in it's operation.
With any of the three here you can hotlink any file.
There is more others could list I suppose.
But these are in the control of someone else.
So they can cancel their free services as some have.
Hordit.com canceled their free offer and changed to all paid services.
XDrive cancelled their 5gb free service as well as XDrive itself.
So backing up to something you own is better, while online services is just a plus and convenience, depending on your needs.
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cman
here's a writeup on mozy.com
it has it's uniqueness as well
2gb free
http://elitefreeware.blogspot.com/2009/02/...ne-storage.html
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krys
WOW! thanks guys.
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mchud11
It's really a question of what you want to spend. And by spending, that combination of time or money. There are plenty of places to put data nowdays, up on the internet. And lots of ways to put data on a disc or a stick. There are USB hard drives that are going down in price, an alternative to a USB stick. If you have a DVD player on your PC and it is Double Layer, you can get around 8 gigs per disc on that (DL discs are what a buck or a buck and a half a disc). If you are going to blu-ray on your computer, you can put a lot of data on a blu-ray disc, you would need a blu-ray burner, I don't know the exact capacity of Blu-ray discs, but am thinking like 25gig. If you have really critical stuff, then you go to a Raid array. Like cman, I believe has mentioned, an extra drive is always a good idea, I bought a 1T drive (1,000gig) for like 129 or so a few weeks ago. What I would also look into is imaging software, it does a bit by bit copy of a drive, sort of the same idea as those discs you get when you buy a pc, "recovery discs"...here you are taking a snapshot of the whole drive with all your stuff, plenty of this type of software out there...many drives, like in buying a new backup drive have the software included with a new drive...regrds..michael
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cman
you may want to use Teracopy for copying files.
It has pause and resume. And it's fast enough.
You can set it as the default copier or not.
http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php
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TheInvisibleDan
Those USB flash-stick thingies are really good.
Have been using one 4 gig Kingston stick to back up all the music I've been working on.
And they're cheap enough.
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cman
here's another free one
for a limited time
it was supposed to end march 1st
but it is still active downloadable and register with the email they send
http://for-free-on-internet.com/2009/03/pa...ion-free-promo/
btw-Titan Backup has backup and sync capabilities
compressed backup or not compressed
and the files in an uncompressed backup are usable
it's a good program
paragon is really good i hear
haven't tried yet
but i just got it
get both imo, if you have the hard drive space
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krys
Thanks cman. When I tried the one you suggested via link in post #12, it was already gone. Late evening 3/6. I'm lookinf for paragon now.
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cman
it will come up again-free paragon, or another
titan's download still works
http://www.techsupportalert.com/free-titan-backup.htm
here's paragon
http://www.drive-backup.com/
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cman
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TrustAndObey
My two cents..
Flash drives still are not big enough, unless you only keep a collection of documents. Which if that is the case, flash drive with a auto sync to keep your "My Documents" up to date on your flash drive works great. (Windows Backup always worked for me and comes free with your PC, along with a scheduler to schedule how often and when ran).
But for many, who keep videos and music, that 32gb flash drive won't hold much.. And most backup now days are Hard drive to hard drive. Which is where HDD docking stations have come into play in the last few years. Just go buy a 1TB hard drive and a docking station that costs $35, and you can image your entire computer for free. Free Imaging software suggestions - Selfimage or Driveimage XML...
Depends how much and how often you need. Flash drive for small jobs, Hard drive docking stations for large.. Microsoft Backup for small or predictable files, imaging for large 100% dependable!
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oldiesman
I heard that carbonite.com was a good online backup system.
$50.00 per year.
I am thinking about giving them a try myself.
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