About external hard drive backups and online backup sites

[OneGrassRoot]

I just went through another crash, as my UPS failed and a power surge fried my hard drive. :(

A Seagate external drive for about $170 came highly recommended by two techies, as well as the following online backup program:

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/


Any other personal recommendations? The reason I love the idea of an external hard drive is that I was told it will essentially create a "mirror" of my working hard drive, so if something happens I shouldn't have to reload all the programs again -- and try to get various programs to "play nice -- which is the hardest part of the equation for me when something goes wrong.

:)

[pokerfan]

1. I use rsync

It's fast in that it only copies files that have changed since the last sync.

rsync was originally written as a replacement for rcp and scp. As such, it has a similar syntax to its parent programs. Like its predecessors, it still requires a source and a destination to be specified, one of which may be remote. Because of the flexibility, speed and script-ability of rsync, it has become popular with many system administrators. This has resulted in rsync being ported to Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

[OneGrassRoot]

2. Thanks, pokerfan

I'm surprised more aren't like that -- only copying files that have changed since the last sync.

:)

[pokerfan]

3. perhaps holdovers from the tape days

or backing up to a stack of floppies. But if you're backing up to another drive there's really no excuse.

Rsync has some other nice features like ssh support for secure network file transfers. And if the command line isn't your thing, there are GUI shells like grsync.

[Old and In the Way]

4. I have 2 hard drives for redundant back-up and a 3rd for monthly back-up

I use Retrospect software that came with my Western Digital harddrive. Basically, I keep my entire business directory in a single folder on my desktop and the software does a complete b/u (actually add's new files and or changed ones) every other day to one or the other drive.

Might be overkill, but I don't want to lose any of that data (35 gigs of records since 2000). So far, so good.

[RC]

5. I gave up on Retrospect.

When I go anywhere for a few days or more, I shut my computers down. That apparently breaks Retrospect when it is shut down when it is scheduled to do a backup. I have to go through the motions of setting it up again. When it works, its great.