Do you backup your home system?

[d3bruts1d]

Good morning. Today, we want to know how (or if) you back up your home system. If you do backups, let us know how you do that backup, and if you use any special software tell us about that as well.

 

No, RAID is not a backup, but since I know some people rely on that only I have it listed.

[Munkypoo7]

Chose: I backup to an external drive or disk, that stays on my desk.

 

Its a little Seagate BlackArmor drive that holds my stuffies in case of cluster#@%^ing.

[Phil]

Poll should be set for more than one choice.

 

I'm backed up to several different computers, a connected external drive, a portable drive on my desk and another one kept in another building. Yes, that's a little crazy I know, but only a couple of the backups are really up to date. I also have all of my photos on Skydrive and all of my music on a gmail account.

[psycho_terror]

i back up some stuff on external drives, but i let win7 take care of my main backup, and it's to an internal drive (which doesn't seem to be an option in your poll).

[Psywar]

I use windows so I reformat / backup every 6 months...

On to an external 1TB drive.

[CheeseMan42]

I voted the first one because I don't backup, but I really should.

[rmb938]

nope. I reformat my pc at the end of every school year which is the end of june. Only things I need to backup is my music(using spotify now so don't need to any more), my game I am working on and the files for my website. All together its only about 1GB so its not really a backup

[Scott P]

I lost years of stuff when a six month old Seagate drive died. After that rebuild, I started using online backups. That company closed, so I've been relegated to a portable hard drive. When I build my new machine, I plan on finding some automated backup software to keep up on that task.

[dr_bowtie]

I back up to 2 other systems....

 

I built a media server a few years back and I just added a back up drive and we currently back up all the PCs in the house to the server on a regular basis....I also keep and exact copy of everything on another rig....like a raid 1 but on a separate rig...I didnt do a raid 1 on the same rig just in case the rig died and took all the drives with it...this way I am sure to come out with 1 set of drive...other than natural disaster...

[robAP]

I backup to a DVD of only the important files and that stays nearby. the only thing i've really noted as a "can't loose" item is the photography. Pickup a DSLR and a 4gb memory card and you will fill up so much space faster than you can imagine. suddenly you have so much to backup. but now that I have ALOT of music and video stored on the home server, I should investigate an external backup system, or create a raid-5 array. The only downside to a raid-5 is im spending 3x the cost for the same storage as a single drive. but it ensures ultimate realibilty of the information stored on it. and when i exceed that capacity, I would need to spend another chunk again on 3 drives to maintain the space of 1. Oh well. such is the cost of maintenance. It's not the drive quitting, it's the space being exceeded.

 

So when will that desktop external not be large enough? just start stacking them up on each other? and when does reliability of the external become an issue?

[fire_storm]

What I do for a backup is I put all my music, videos and software on one hard drive and install Windows on another so if something happens to windows I just reformat the windows drive and I still have my stuff.

 

I don't typically make images because after the image is restored I find that I end up spending a lot of time installing all the windows/software updates that have come out since I made the image and the whole process is just about as time consuming as a format and re-install.

[mac173]

I backup through Optimum Online using Carbonite. I just upgraded all three of my computers to Win7 and the backups were really helpful. I find it fairly easy to use and non-intrusive. The only thing is that if you want to do a quick restore, there is no option for that. Restore does take a long while.