I use a flash drive but I'd like to get a program that automatically and immediately backs up everything that's on my hard drive. I heard a commercial for a company called Carbonite but don't really know much about them or other companies. Thanks for any suggestions you have!

I have XP and use the built-in tool called Backup. Also have a network device (buy them for $100 or less I think) that connects to a wireless. You can select different directories you want to back up and the interval to back up.

Easy setup.

Bonnie,

Carbonite is a great idea.

Other than photos of you and the dog in drag what can be so guarded?

bon bon ever heard of a Mac and time machine?

Posted by Nalod:

Bonnie,

Carbonite is a great idea.

Other than photos of you and the dog in drag what can be so guarded?

Teaching documents (grades, lesson plans) and research data. It would suck if I lost them. I try to back things up daily on my flash drive but don't always remember too. I've hard flash drives crash too.

[Edited by - bonn1997 on 09-09-2009 10:30 AM]

Posted by Bonn1997:

Posted by Nalod:

Bonnie,

Carbonite is a great idea.

Other than photos of you and the dog in drag what can be so guarded?

Teaching documents (grades, lesson plans) and research data. It would suck if I lost them. I try to back things up daily on my flash drive but don't always remember too. I've hard flash drives crash too.

[Edited by - bonn1997 on 09-09-2009 10:30 AM]

Bonn, you are a good man. I had this professor junior year, I had an 83 on my first exam, but then dropped the class due to alcohol abuse. The next year, I tried to contact him, to affirm my 83, so that I could take a prerequisite as a co-, but he didn't have the data. He didn't back the data up. It's good you're backing yours up.

Posted by Bonn1997:

Posted by SupremeCommander:

Posted by Bonn1997:

I use a flash drive but I'd like to get a program that automatically and immediately backs up everything that's on my hard drive. I heard a commercial for a company called Carbonite but don't really know much about them or other companies. Thanks for any suggestions you have!

I just bought an external hardrive and it automatically back up everything. It requires no thought. 320 gigs of automated thought free bliss

Thanks for the info. You don't have to tell it to save the documents like you do with a flash drive? How much did yours cost? What brand/model did you get?

[Edited by - bonn1997 on 09-09-2009 1:49 PM]

Bonn! You be dissin' me right now. I defeated Supreme in the race to enlighten you about external hard drives. I've had one since '98. Get any external you want, bro, they're all plug and play, usb drives. It's all gravy. Supreme lost the challenge.

For my home system I use an external hard drive and a program called "Robocopy" that is part of the Microsoft resource kit set of tools. I like doing it this way because the files are immediately accessible on the drive and I don't have to open an archive or load any extra software to get to them. I just back everything up because it isn't always easy to know what you'll want when your drive fails.

For clients, I've set up backup systems using microsoft's backup utility to backup to tape, but it is a fairly basic and primitive backup system. I've also used Yosemite. Most of the other tape backup programs are pretty pricey. Yosemite emails you the results, which I like. Of course you can get an email of the microsoft backup too, with some extra scripting.

I don't like to rely soley on tape, however, and people with huge amounts of data pretty much have to go with some kind of external enclosure. For redundancy you can use two external drives and rotate them. Some external enclosures also incorporate RAID, comprising of two or more drives so you can at least get mirroring or some higher level of RAID. In the case of an external drive, I prefer to use Robocopy so that the files are immediately accessible, and for business purposes, I suggest rotating two external devices and always keeping one off-site.

Online backup systems can be convenient, but too pricey for large amounts of data. You can also set up your own online system if you have two sites with internet access. You can set up a VPN and robocopy between machines on the network. You can set Robocopy to only backup the files that have changed so you're not transferring huge amounts of data over the internet after the initial backup. The great thing about this type of system is you get the data off-site right away.

For unix systems I usually do some kind of remote backup using rsync tunnelled through ssh. I've also used Unison, which is also available on Windows Systems and has some advantages over Robocopy, but doesn't deal well with the long pathnames you tend to find on Windows Systems.

Posted by Bonn1997:

Posted by Nalod:

Bonnie,

Carbonite is a great idea.

Other than photos of you and the dog in drag what can be so guarded?

Teaching documents (grades, lesson plans) and research data. It would suck if I lost them. I try to back things up daily on my flash drive but don't always remember too. I've hard flash drives crash too.

[Edited by - bonn1997 on 09-09-2009 10:30 AM]

Get two flash drives and alternate them. Just get in the habit of doing the backup every day, or every time your data changes. If I do a backup by hand, I do it right after I finish work for the day. For me that means coding, so when I'm done coding, I just do my backup at that time.

Posted by Bonn1997:

Oh it's something you'd have to bring with you everywhere you work on your laptop to plug it in? Not sure I want that now. That's no better than a flash drive!

[Edited by - bonn1997 on 09-09-2009 2:15 PM]

If you don't want to have to carry anything around, look into an online backup system like Mozy.

http://mozy.com/