Backing up whole computer

I use a rAID storage device for data only..... Movies, pics, stuff you can't replace. A drobo... Then I use Crashplan to cloud backup the computer and all connected drives including the drobo... So I have redundant backups. One in the cloud.... The key is to have an offsite fail safe....

Many newer computers don't even have a DVD drive any more. Our new Acer doesn't.

Sue

I have self made CD's that can still be accessed and they are over 10-12 years old. Yes, they won't last forever, but neither will I. :) And yes, in another 20 years DVD drives may be hard to find...maybe. If I'm archiving data it will be on a DVD and a SD card. Just the way I feel about things.

Hard drives are great for back ups, but I wouldn't store irreplaceable data only on spinning disk hard drives. Spinning disk hard drives crash. Multiple hard drives lessen the odds, but stuff happens.

Sounds like you are trying to copy (archive) some files important to you, to offline media. Usually with CD/DVD/Blu-Ray writers there will be software to split copies across multiple volumes, but that does not mean the computer you have ten years from now will be able to do restores; I've just been through that exercise with some copies made using Roxio tools.

One of the issues I had during restoration was how to deal with multiple copies of the same thing. During the period in question, I was saving data every month to every several months, so I might have 20-30 copies of some files over the life of a particular computer, and most had been transferred from computer to computer: desktop before going overseas, laptop overseas, desktop overseas, laptop on coming home, each computer successively larger storage capacity (usually by one or two orders of magnitude) than the previous. What really saved me on restore from CD and DVD was that the computer I was restoring to had 15X the storage of the largest disk drive I had archived.

Yes, if you are using appropriate software, you will be prompted for a new disk, when you do multi-volume copies. To CDs? The computer I am using just now would need at least 300,000 CD-Rs, 3,000 DVD-R or DVD+R, to back up just one full disk drive.

I am currently copying what is important to me to multiple external hard disk drives, much less expensive than removable media like CD-R or DVD-R.

Back up the total computer? A backup is quite a bit different from an archive, as it is trying to capture the state of a running computer, rather than saving or making copies of important files.

Few systems are actually capable of this, as things change during the backup. I've had more success with backups on Unix, VMS, and pre-Windows DOS computers than with Windows computers.

The Microsoft-provided Windows Backup Tool will back up "user files" and "data" Windows can also create a "system restore" (usually to multiple DVDs) that can get the OS back to a specific point, though you would likely need to re-install all application software, and then restore your user and data files. There are many third party tools that do better, and some (often provided with external hard drives and CD/DVD writers) that do not do as well.

There are third party tools that can make a mirror image copy of a system disk to a second disk. I've not tried this approach, as the state of my system changes second to second, I would maybe be doing nothing except making mirror images?

Figure out just what your goals are. If what you want to do is save particular files important to you, the best approach is often to attach an external hard disk drive of adequate size, and do a drag-and-drop copy. When your data volume gets beyond about 10 GB (50 CD-Rs) CDs become uneconomic (and they are not reliable long-term). For DVD-R, that cross-over is now about 100-200 GB, on media costs alone, not including your time.

Another reason not to use optical media is that optical drives are quickly disappearing from the scene, just like floppy drives. In the near future it will be difficult to find a computer with an optical drive.

Everyone needs to realize that CDs and DVDs do not last forever--the ones you burn in a DVD-RW drive are not the same as commercially pressed disks. I have a few backups from 5 years ago that are unreadable, even by the drive that created them. So, if you're archiving important docs or valued pics, optical media is not the way to go.

The main reasons are transfer speed, read/write speed, ease of connection, easy to move offsite for safe storage, ability to connect to different computers, and security. I probably missed a couple things, but I think I hit the high points.

fj12ryder wrote:
A USB drive is superior to anything else for backup and recovery

Just curious: why?

I think we all agree that there is a difference between doing backups and archiving data. A USB drive is superior to anything else for backup and recovery, not so much for archiving data.

I think the best plan is for the OP to archive her photos and such, and then do some OS backups. The OS can always be reinstalled and/or repaired, but when getting photos back can be a tough, or not happen at all.

I started out doing backups using floppy disks. It wasn't unusual to require 20-30 or more disks, depending on how much data was being backed up.

I next graduated to a tape drive. A tape drive was easier to use than floppy disks but still took a long time to backup or restore.

I skipped over using CDs or DVDs for backup, too expensive and too slow.

When disk drives started getting more than a few gigabytes in size, all previous backup methods became a bothersome chore. I then graduated to using an external hdd and now would never use anything else.

Yes, it costs a bit for the external drive and you may have to buy some software (although there are some decent free backup programs available) but you need to decide how important your data is to you and think about what it would be like if you lost all of it.

I recently bought a 4TB external drive just to use for backups. I have multiple computers and 4TB will allow me to keep them all backed up using a single drive.

Most modern backup programs allow you to schedule regular backups so you don't need to remember to do it. Of course that means the backup drive needs to be connected all the time but that really isn't a problem.