External/removealbe back up device....

[Junior_co]

OK, so here the situation. (sry if I repeat myself... again....)

We run two computers, and we have been backing them both up in case of a hard drive crash. We've been doing this by backing up one computer on to the other.... done every couple of days or so....

But now My Better Half is getting worried about loss of info and data due to fire, theft, nucular attack etc etc... The way were backing up now wouldn't prevent loss of data for that type scenerio, so I pose this question to you...

What would you use to back up two computers (maybe three in the future) that is removealbe and storeable in a fire/safe type encloser??? This would be for a monthly back up process

Preferably something fairly simple that MBH could use with ease... She is computer savy but doesn't want it to be something that's a pain in the A$$....

Thanks again for the thoughts and assistance....

Junior

[th3_d0n]

Hey

I would suggest the best thing to do would be to keep a backup on a seperate site. Possibly a friends house, or family. A neighbour may not be the best idea because if there is a fire at your house, which I hope there never will be, it could spread to your neighbours house as well.

Maybe something like a bank safety deposit box, that could be a bit extreme, and I don't know how much that would cost.

Hope this helps

[Junior_co]

Yea, that is kinda what we were thinking...


But what would you use to back up to?? Will using an external Hard Drive work for two or three different computers with 2-3 different operating systems? Or can different file formats from the two not be compatible?

Thanks

Junior

[Gecko]

First hand experience speaking here, if you do go with a safe make sure that it is both fire proof and water proof.

I use Drive Image to do all of my backups but it is no longer available, Symantec bought it up.

Symantec does have their own backup software called that has many similar features.
Ghost will do full hard drive backups as well as incremental backups to just about any type of media.
Hard drives, CDR/RW, DVD+-R/RW, USB, FireWire even Zip drives using disk spanning.
It also uses data compression so the “disk images” are smaller than the space used on the hard drive.
Typically the “disk images” are around half the size of the used space on a hard drive.

Each month I do full image backups to DVDs and store them in my fire and water proof safe.
I also do full weekly backups to slaved hard drives in each system as well as incremental backups to CDs.
To make sure we don’t loose any daily work I do incremental backups nightly to the slaved drives.