Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in
Your question

Best backup plan

Tags:
  • Backup
  • Business Computing
  • Portable Hard Drive
Last response: in Business Computing
Share
June 22, 2014 10:47:57 PM

Hi all, I have Acronis, am on Windows 7 64 bit, I have all my data on a 1TB external portable hard drive, this has about 900GB of data on it, and it's critical that I have a great, totally reliable, quick backup plan. The data has emails going back many years and website stuff etc. In case of a hard drive failure, I need to just plug another usb external hard drive in and move on, within a few minutes. Any ideas please?

More about : backup plan

June 27, 2014 1:10:58 PM

In the case of backups, nothing is completely fool-proof. I would just backup to multiple backup locations, like another portable drive (or two) and an online backup provider.

Since you already own Acronis, I believe you can buy backup cloud storage from them as well. There are a lot of other cloud storage providers, so figure out what that data is worth to you. Check out this link to see a nice compiled chart of some pricing on cloud storage solutions.
m
0
l
June 27, 2014 1:51:34 PM

Many thanks for that. I may also go for online backups.
m
0
l
Related resources
June 27, 2014 2:41:20 PM

-Chris- said:
Many thanks for that. I may also go for online backups.


I would say that adding another external drive will be cheaper, if you're looking to keep costs down. At 900GB, that's a lot for a single cloud storage provider when most are only giving away 15GB for free and pay-per-GB after that.

One thing connected external drives don't protect you from is malware threats that have interact with files, like the so-called "ransomware" that encrypts your files & tries to make you pay them to decrypt it. So perhaps you keep a 2nd external drive disconnected, and then only connect it once a week to make your backup. Otherwise, you can use a cloud storage provider who supports scheduled backups. Then, you should be able to recover your data even if your local hard drives are compromised.

m
0
l
June 28, 2014 12:03:06 AM

Many thanks. Perhaps I'll just stick with externals. What's the best free or paid software to quickly backup 900GB please?
m
0
l
June 30, 2014 8:26:21 AM

-Chris- said:
Many thanks. Perhaps I'll just stick with externals. What's the best free or paid software to quickly backup 900GB please?


Copying directly in Windows is free. Select all of your files, then copy & paste into new location. You can even use Windows Backup (again, built-in to Windows, so it's free) to schedule backups.

Other paid programs may give you different scheduling options or even compression/encryption options along with cloud storage. You already have one - Acronis - so play with it if you want to experiment.

Of course, leaving a 2nd drive always-connected defeats the purpose of having a secondary backup that won't be compromised if your main system is compromised. If that doesn't concern you, then keep it connected & copy/schedule at will.
m
0
l
!