Re: Backup for Home PC and Laptop

On 9/6/2010 9:51 AM, Lennon_s_j@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

I want to move beyond CDs for backup of my home PC (XP) & laptop
(Vista). The obvious solution seems to be a USB External Hard Drive.

Spot on.

Most of the one’s I’ve looked at seem to come with vendor supplied
backup software, but don’t seem to have much detail on the software
capabilities.

I've found the vendor software to be pretty weak in terms of capability ... it will do the job, but just barely.

I don’t know that I want continuous backup. I’m more inclined to want
to say when to do a back up (probably weekly) and want to keep several
generations of the backup (this week, last week, the week before, etc.)
Though possibly a continuous backup will allow me to keep “n” copies of
a file and that might be easier for restores.

My personal favorite is Norton Ghost ... it's pretty solid, in general, and can do a periodic scheduled backup ... part of the schedule can be a full backup followed by incremental backup's.

I also want to back up *both* my desktop and my laptop to the one
external drive.

You'll either need to swap the drive between machines, or attach it to a NAS server.

If you go the NAS route, I suggest you get something that can do gigabit.

I’d like to hear your about your experience with specific hardware, the
vendor supplied software, or non-vendor specific software (e.g. Ghost or
Acronis, and your approach to backup).

I use Ghost both at home & work ... the ITS guy at work likes Acronis.

As for hardware ... personally, I usually get a case & drive separately ... I like Antec & vantec cases & Seagate drives.

(And I’m curious about how these drives connect. Do they just plug in
and act like a USB Memory Stick? Can you reformat them? Make multiple
partitions? Do they all work the same way?--I’ve read some that Western
Digital drives install some strange software.)

USB hard drives & memory sticks generally appear to the computer the same way ... there is some internal identification in the device to indicate if it's a removable or fixed device.

They are partitioned & formatted the same way as any hard drive. No special software is required in modern operating systems.

david