RealTown's RealTalk

I use the iDrive.com back up system, and have been quite pleased with it.
You can schedule back ups for anytime, and also use the continuous back up
process. It is simple and quick, not too expensive, and it is good to know
my files are safe somewhere.

Kedda Keough
Shelton Land & Homes, LLC
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External backups are my preferred approach. They are fairly simple and inexpensive these days. I bought a 1/2 terabit last year and haven't regretted it yet.

This thread is loaded with good information. I have used Acronis True Image to clone a larger drive for my old Dell laptop and it is probably the best product in its class out there.

I also have a couple of NAS drives at home which are just like external USB drives but they have a network connection.

For the cloud, I happen to be using DropBox (www.getdropbox.com) for web development and programming because it's fairly popular with those groups but Carbonite looks good as well.

Most of my space is used by photos so my primary backup is with several portable drives (just got a half terrabyte Western Digital with FireWire 800 for $126, boy is it fast) and the NAS.

I use a Mac now and all I do is plug in the drive and forget it. The backup is automatic and I get reminded when a week goes by.

Unfortunately, there really wasn't something similar for my wife's notebook. Everything required some sort of action.

That is UNTIL NOW! I just picked up a Seagate Replica which looks like it may be the Time Machine for the PC. I plugged it in last night, clicked a couple of times, and that was it.

$99 from BestBuy. Here is a review which may tell you if it's right for you.

http://reviews.cnet.com/laptop-hard-drives/seagate-replica-single-pc/4505-9997_7-33645747.html?tag=mncol;txt

Personally, I like the fact that you don't need to do anything special. I want something like that for a baseline and I will use OTHER drives to go beyond that for extra backups

Malcolm Waring, REALTOR®, e-PRO
Pocono Homes

You need a lot of external drive space so that you can keep everything. Believe it or not, even though your hard drive may only be 80Gb, it will not take long to fill up 500Gb.

My main laptop hard drive is only 60Gb, yet I have a 6-Tb backup system that is 40% full. The system I have is regarded by many to be the cadillac of backup systems, because of how it works. It is a Drobo system with 4 x 1.5Tb drives in it. The Drobo will save all of your data even if 3 of the drives fail and there is more than the capacity of the one good drive in your backup.
By this example, I mean that, even tho I have 2.8Tb of data, if 3 drives failed, leaving me with only 1.5Tb of space, I wouldn't lose my data.

I've been anal about backup for as long as backups have existed, and it has paid off well, as RAID drives have failed or my laptop has died or external drives have failed, etc. I currently back up to my Drobo plus 2 other external drives; it's all automatic and done in the middle of the night.

HTH

@Mark said:

"Believe it or not, even though your hard drive may only be 80Gb, it will not take long to fill up 500Gb"

Yes that's true but what I want is an automated backup system that will keep saving newer versions of everything automatically. Once the available space is filled up it will start rolling off the older versions of each file as newer ones are saved.

This is how the Apple Time Machine and Seagate Replica (PC) both work.

If you have business and accounting files for the office then they should be on a server and you probably should be saving copies weekly or monthly. That's a different scope and beyond what I need.

As for the Drobo, it doesn't get any better than that. I believe it goes beyond standard RAID because you can throw and combination of drives in there. With RAID, they all have to be the same.

Malcolm Waring, REALTOR®, e-PRO
Pocono Real Estate

6/20/2009 @ 11:17 PM HST

@Catherine Myers:
I just signed up for Carbonite. It took 6 days for it to do my initial back up,

Could you expand on this? I'm not clear why it would take 6 days to back up.


With Warmest Aloha,

Ruth A. Gabbard (R), CRB, CRS, SRES, PB
Gabbard Hawaii Properties | Honolulu, Hawaii
808-534-1850 | 877-ALOHA HI (256-4244) Toll Free
Listserv E-mail: hawaiihomes@alohamls.com

Your transferring data via Internet connection.

Hard drives are large and can contain a very large amount of data.

Uploading data to a Web site is much slower than copying data to a connected hard drive.

First backup will take the longest because it's backing up EVERYTHING you designate to be convered (files, folders, etc.). After the first backup, usually only changed files since the last backup will be sent.

Hope this helps.