BACKING-UP YOUR PC INFORMATION

[Oaktree]

Look for a program called Clonezilla. You can make the portable disk bootable. Then you create backup images of your computers with it. If something goes south on your computer, you boot from the portable drive and restore from the image you made with Clonezilla.

Clonezilla is good for what it is, and you can't beat the price!! My only quibble with it is that it maintains partition size...if you clone an (for example) 80gig drive to a 1TB one, you have all your data on an 80gig partition. Yeah, you can use a partitioning program to remedy that, but it's an extra step. I use Ghost myself.

I don't backup anything to the "cloud" 1). Rural 20GB monthly data cap couldn't handle it 2). Data is more susceptible to hackers.

I prefer to keep everything local and under MY control as much as possible. Backups are done to external hard drives.

Another concern would be is the cloud provider going to still be there when I need it? Tech companies go feet up all the time, though I suppose if you stuck with MS or Google you could be reasonably sure they'll be in business for the foreseeable future. Computer Joe's Backups R Us, maybe not.

On a regular basis I backup the data drive/folder to a NAS with auxiliary backup software, including the C:\USERS\xxx folders. And the NAS is backed up occasionally to a USB drive.

A NAS is a good thing to have, a RAIDed NAS even better. Maybe a little beyond what a non-tech savvy person would be able to set up though.

 

[MossRoad]

Clonezilla is good for what it is, and you can't beat the price!! My only quibble with it is that it maintains partition size...if you clone an (for example) 80gig drive to a 1TB one, you have all your data on an 80gig partition. Yeah, you can use a partitioning program to remedy that, but it's an extra step. I use Ghost myself.

Its been a while, however, I recall an option in the advanced settings where you can specify to either maintain the same partition(s) size(s) on the target disk or expand it to fill the target disk.

 

[dmccarty]

I just use a $23 hard drive docking sled and have a couple of Western Digital 500 GB drives I alternate with system backups and straight up folder backups...

I do the same. However, I bought a 1TB hard drive earlier in the year to replace my 750GB drive. Never had the time to swap the drives though. :thumbdown: I just ordered a external USB enclosure that will hold the 750GB drive when I swap out the drives over the holiday. Which got me thinking about buying plain hard drives in the future and just swapping them out using the USB enclosure.

When I was looking at the USB enclosures, I noticed how much SSD's have dropped in price. The laptop has a 500GB SSD but the larger SSDs had dropped in prices to a point that makes me think about upgrading.

Later,
Dan