Back It Up
Well, after many years of talking about it, I finally have all of my data on a regular backup schedule. I have two internal and one external hard drives on my desktop, and an internal hard drive in my laptop – all of which have important data (i.e., I’d be sunk if I lost most of it).
To backup all of my data, I decided to use one 500 GB Western Digital MyBook to hold it all (I already use another MyBook for some of my data storage and really love it).
To schedule and perform the backups, I downloaded SyncBack Freeware. I was originally turned on to SyncBack by a Lifehacker post about it. They were right. It really is that simple, it’s fast, and it does a great job. And the best part is that it’s totally free!
I would walk you through the steps I took to do it, but honestly, the Lifehacker post really does a great job of explaining everything, so I’ll just let it speak for itself.
In the not-to-distant future, I also plan to set up a secure FTP backup of some of the more important files.
My question for you is: Are you backing up your data? If so, how?
Geek to Live: Automatically back up your hard drive via Lifehacker
The big issue is how to do an incremental back up. I JUST posted about this yesterday:
http://ckurl.com/post/Lots-of-data.aspx
I tried SyncBack but didn’t see an incremental backup setting. Reading the LifeHacker article you referenced I see a recommendation for Acronis True Image, but that is $50.
Considering writing my own simple app that only updates new or modified files. Not hard, but I’d much rather find an app that already does this for me.
I’m currently relying on mozy.com. A free online deal to back up my important stuff. Problem is that it’s pretty small. I’ve only been using it for a few weeks, and my Mozy account is 99.6% full!
Clarence: If you buy SyncBack SE (about $30), it supports incremental backup. Also, you could look into a solution using rsync (free) – I believe Lifehacker had an article about how to use it for incremental backups.
I’d pay money for incremental… I’ll send them an email to see if it has a few other features I’d want.
While free is great, if its affordable I’ll pay just to support other software developers like myself.
I’ll second the use of Mozy. The free service provides 2GB of online backup. It is off site so it is even safer then a local back up and unlimited storage is $4.95 per month. 2 years of Mozy service would be about $120 (about the cost of an external drive at newegg prices) and I’d probably need more storage anyway in 2 years time.
It even has a slider similar to Norton Ghost on speed vs. performance. Nice. And restoring is easy even if you just want one file.