Been looking at ways of backing up my harddrive.
There is a Maxtor 200G USB External HD for $129 after a $70 mail in rebate.
Is this a good deal? Will the HD backup just my data or will it copy all the installed programs as well (if I lose my current HD, can the Maxtor put everything I need back on a new one without installing all my s/w?)?

Thanks,
~Rob

 

Yes, it will make an exact backup. Check Microcenter...you might find a larger drive for a litle more money.

 

I'm not sure that it will allow you to restore everything without reinstalling O/S and software. What you need is something like Norton Ghost. It creates an image of your hard drive and allows you to reload it back onto the computer after a loss. It can be used from a hdd or DVD or CDs. It is a really nice program and eMachines was using it on their restore discs for a while, until Gateway took over.

 

correct nirion is spot on. norton ghost is what you need. I have/had the 160G external drive and yes it will copy all your "user data" but not the OS or programs installed. Look into Norton Ghost and create an image of your drive. OS, installed apps everything is saved with a .gho file even the bad stuff, it's a mirror image of what you currently have.

Bill.

 

Yup use norton ghost it has saved my bacon more than once. I backup each pc once a month.

 

I only backup the data files because I can reload my OS and be back online within hours of the crash. I have my home computers on a network so I backup my data to the drives on my other computers hard drives. But even though I am on the network I have a raid array in this computer and it automaticley mirrors to 2 additional drives. My plan was to install Ghost on this computer when I built it several months back but I never got that far and the disk is still in the box. I have used tape drive backup units and when I needed them the most, would you belive it failed!
I got me a USB/ Firewire external case and put in a 300 gb. hard drive then put in 2 partitions on the drive. I use this for work if a computer is getting sketchy or something I will first back off all of the important files before I try to do any work to it. This has saved several clients rear ends a couple of times when her kids downloaded some viruses with the games.
Also as for hard drives, I have lost more Maxtors then Western Digital's which seem to have really been getting a QC issue.
I have had the best luck with Fujitsu, Segate and the old IBM now Hitachi.
But if you can save your data to a backup drive or burn it to a CD, DVD then you should be able to swap out the bad drive and have it spinning with the new OS and software and be back up in a couple of hours.
Have you considered just installing a slave drive in the case and transfer the files to the slave drive?
Also make sure to hang on to all of your "Recovery" disk and driver disk, it will be a pain and in some instances impossable without them.
This is what I do. Jim

 

What I usually do is to take hard disk frames to make them removeable. Then when I want to backup my system (not only data) I boot from a linux CD and do a dd to the second drive. (A bit for bit readout into an image file) - This works regardless of the OS installed on the computer.
Then I shut it down, remove the second drive and put it into the vault with the boot CD, so I can restore the system from backup state anytime I choose within less than one hour.
Databackups at home work by script that will tar and zip (tgz) the data and configuration directories to a network share on another machine. (LVM network storage, holding about 1,2 TBytes at the moment, soon to be upgraded), any project data is also burned on CD or DVD depending on size and labeled with project name and date. (You might notice that my office is what I call home)
My personal opinion is that no one needs a backup strategy. What's really necessary is a restore strategy. So I prefer to handle all data in a format that is readable almost everywhere with devices that are around in abundance and with the minimum tools of the operating system where they need to be processed.

On Windows boxes I like to install the utility "Merge IDE" directly after setup, this tool does help a lot if you have to swap to a mainboard with a different chipset.

Just my 2c

AlpineRAM

 

If you want you can get an Internal and set it up to mirror. Then if you lose your main drive the other one will take over and run everything. This is an exact copy that runs along with the primary. You can then pull out the failed drive and run on the mirrored until you get it replaced then you can put the new drive as the mirror drive and it will start replicating on to the new mirror.

Just be careful as the primary drive with some windows OS raid level 1 (mirroring) will always put what is on the primary drive onto the secondary drive. So if you put the replacement drive is as a primary while it is still new, it will turn your backup drive into a copy of your new drive. You lose everything.

You might be able to do the above with a USB, not sure as I have not tried it.

Or you can use norton ghost and back everything to CD\DVD and then if you crash you just boot off of the CD\DVD and put it all back. But you lose whatever was added\modified since the image was made.

 

I think that mirroring is only covering a part of the problems addressed by backups. It will cover hard disk HARDWARE failure more or less. It won't cover you in any event like lightning striking the power cords (both disks smoldering) viruses (Hey, we've got the same non-working installation twice) or inadvertend deletion of files (You delete it on both disks).
While I think it's good to run a RAID array for performance and reliability it strongly depends on how far you care to go, how deep are your pockets and how much downtime you can tolerate.

A backup will cover you in the cases I mentioned above, but won't keep your system up in case of a harddisk failure. It won't cover any work done since the last backup. So a good combination of both is what I can recommend.

AlpineRAM

 

For ultimate backup protection:

RAID 5 on SCSI drives, tape backup, and GHOST image!

A little pricey, but effective

 

Norton Ghost has issues with WindowsXP so the newest versions work best, otherwise you have to initialize the hard drive and reload the OP sys first. The newer version works much better believe me. You boot up on PCDOS diskette and you can perform a disk to disk copy or a partition to partition. Beware a disk to disk copy when one or both drives contain a partioned logical drive different than the source, the destination logical drive gets overwritten.
I recommend Norton Ghost highly. But if you ever purchase Symantec support you have to ask for someone who speaks US/Canadian English without the Indian/Pakistani dialect.
Nat

 

If you use Windows XP then just use the Backup utility and Backup everything including the system state. The system state data is your registry and other things that you'll need in case of a full system crash. I.E. if you lose your hard disk, you use the system recovery floppy disk the system creates for you along with the XP CD and it will restore your complete system. The new hard disk must be the same or larger than the one it is replaceing. If you're restoring to new hardware you have to do a manual re-install and restore files then restore system state.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro...ntain/asr.mspx

Edwin