What is your preferred method of Backing up your PC

[rob123]

each of the 2 main drive manufacturers ( seagate and western digital) have their own versions of scronis on their sites. it kicks up a fuss if you try to put the backup image on the same drive too.

i used to use dvd's. cant do that anymore, at least not with large amounts of data.

since i am now into literally terrabytes of "stuff" collected from the web, it is not practical to back it up on another drive, unless you buy an external drive or two or 3 ,etc. i use a home server with file duplication turned on.

for your "C" drive, i keep mine as small and clean as possible, then acronis is ideal for that.

rob123

[Behemoth-]

I backup my data to my server/htpc. I don't have enough $$ for a dedicated file server, so I just mirror my data to the htpc. I also prefer my backup to be in another PC. I don't have mission-critical data, yet it would piss me off quite hard to loose it all.

I have a raid volume with O/S and softwares, and all app data as well as documents are on another volume, so I can backup easily important files without software and o/s.

But I'dd sure like to have a huge server + a replication of said server off-site.

edit: I use bestsync for synchronisation of drives.

[Shozzking]

I use an extra HDD inside my computer to back up once a week. I unplug it from my PSU whenever I'm done backing up.

[dustin1706]

You guys that are running file servers, how does that work exactly? I am assuming that it is just a basic pc with windows and some HDDs running 24/7, but is the file synchronization through windows or some third party software? Also, how is your main pc connected to your file server? Gigabit ethernet, firewire, usb 3.0 ...? Of course you are limited by your HDD anyway, but I am just curious.

[grinder]

Acronis on my work laptop, backs up to a DLink DNS-323 thru the network. All my other rigs and servers use simple windows NT backup, to the DNS-323.

[frontier204]

My home server is just an old Pentium 4 running Debian with a Samba share. Windows sees the Samba share as a password-protected network drive (although the userid and password on my laptop and main match those of the server so I don't have to enter anything). So the server is not a complete waste of electricity when not in use, I have it folding for ~100 PPD .

Stats of the server are:

• Pentium 4 Northwood 2.4 GHz
• HP D530 motherboard (Intel 865 chipset)
• Gigabit lan (server's connection to the other PCs)
• 1.25 GB of assorted RAM
• 2x Seagate 7200.10 360GB software RAID 1 for Subversion and OS
• 1x WD Caviar SE16 500GB for my backups (see something wrong here )
  

I back up to the network drive with the Windows 7 file backup, and for my computer with Vista, I use Cobian Backup Cobian Backup because Windows Vista file backup is brain-dead. I like the Windows 7 file backup and Cobian because they both use standard compressed files, so I'm not out of luck if those pieces of software stop existing.