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Best way to back up data.

W

Williamea

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 23, 2004
Messages
142
I have 2 PCs.
1 - Primary Gaming and general use
2 - My old PC that I only use for torrent DLs and streaming to my TV/PS3.

I only need to back up Pics, Docs, Music.

Should I just get 2 drives and use something like SyncBack to keep the data in sync?
RAID 1 setup?
External NAS?
Another option that I may be missing?

HDD Suggestions?
Controler suggestions(if I go raid)?
 
Oh my freaking gosh did you just admit to using torrents. OH my freaking what the hell are you thinking.

Just kidding mate! I had a member blow his top when I said I support torrent usage. I think maybe the whole community laughed at him as well.

Anyways Depending on your budget I highly recommend you use an application called:

Acronis True Image Home 2011. Its only 29.99 per computer. It does full image of the computer, or just your data. It can compress it and then it can also AES encrypt it as well. Great program for the money.

I also recommend you atleast backup to a 2 drive Raid 1 NAS or External USB3/Esata enclosure that supports Raid 1.

As far as Hard Drive I like the Samsung HE103SJ for 1tb or the Samsung HD204UI 2TB for bigger storage. You can go with 3 TB drives but you need to definitely make sure that you have a RAID 1 with a second drive.

Do not (atleast in my recommendation) get WD Green Drives. They seem like they have a high failure rate.
 
HAHA yes I admit I have downloaded a torrent or 2 :)

I would be looking for the best Bang/Buck setup. 1TB would be overkill for now but would give me plenty of room to grow.

What would be the downside of getting 2 drives and getting a utility to sync data between them. And to that note what would be the upside of using 2 drives in a RAID 1 config vs the data sync option.
 
Choose the one that is on more, use it as a central repository. Share the folders from that over your network.

On your second PC, install a drive as well. Use synctoy or any other "smart" copying software to sync new data from computer1 to computer2 daily/weekly/etc.

If you rely on a single array on one computer, it is possible to accidentally delete a folder, where as if you have multiple copies (a real backup, since RAID is not a backup), you could recover from that, or a virus. This answers your RAID vs sync question, if you delete files from a RAID array, they are gone, if you sync, as long as you don't sync the delete, you can recover from the other copy.

If you have a larger budget, you could build or buy a third machine that acts as the central repository, but I would still recommend a second machine as backup source. With this option, the new machine will be dedicated to sharing files, so even if you move computers/OS/etc around on the two others, this one won't be touched and you won't have to worry about migrating data. There are options like WHSv1 that let you add drives as you want to increase space, or ZFS that you have to buy what you think you will need and set it up, with expanding being more time consuming.

If you use Win7, it's built in backup is quite nice, and I wouldn't worry about using anything else if you eventually want to back up entire computers vs pics/docs/vids.
 
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