Silly question about how hard drive backup works

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Malikman

[H]ard|Gawd
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Sep 1, 2004
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I have a most likly silly question about hard drive backing up.
I am triple booting Mac os X, xp, and linux and i want to start backing up many hard drive so if somethihng gets messed up (like any one of my os's or i lose important music) i can just reload it instead of reloading everything the long way.

I have a 160GB hard drive that i just put in my macbook pro... so i have a 80gig hard drive i am going to use as my backup drive once i get a external enclosure. My question is... to bakcup a hard drive i assume you need the same amount of space that you are backing up?? How's backups work if you have a 160gb hard drive and a 80gig hard drive... i am not sure if backing up hard drive compresses the hard drive or anything... as well obviously (well maybe not obviously) i don't have my full 160gig full but i probably have close to 80 or a little over at the moment, but it will be full eventually haha.

So yea, would backing up a 160gig hard drive work if i'm diong it onto a 80gig hard drive?
 
Depends on the software and method you use to backup with. most backup methods include compression to lower the size. Text files compress to a much smaller size usually. JPGs, Zips and other precompresssed files don't compress as well.

Backup's have a terminology all their own. For example a "Full backup" usually means a complete copy of all your data. In this sense data usually refers to data files like documents, movies, MP3s etc. NOT the OS files, and usually not applications like Word, Firefox etc. Backups like this normally need you to tell them what data to backup.

You also have to decide how to deal with how many sets you want to keep. Do you want last weeks backup and this weeks? or just one copy. One copy means if something is wrong with the data you backup your backup has the same flaw. If you keep a week or twos backups you can "go back in time" and hopefully find a good version of the file(s) effected. Saving multiple sets can have your backups taking many times the space of the working set of data, depending on how effective your compression is.

If you want to avoid reloading your OS's you probably want to look at Imaging. Imaging makes a full copy of everything on your hard drive OS, Apps and all. I don't know how you have your OSs setup. Assuming they are each on their own partition you could make a separate image of each partition and save those to recover the OSs independently. I suggest Acronis for most people. Its relatively easy to use and quite powerful.

Backups really need to be tailored to your needs. The standard for a long time was a weekly full backup, with incremental or differential (different ways of saving changes between full backups) done daily. While still effective I am seeing more and more options being taken that stray from the old norm. For example Bit level backup makes one copy of you data (like a full backup) then all future backups are just the bit level changes to the file. So its like a copy of an original with a log of all changes made since so that the original can be remade. Depending on how you want to handle versions and data size constraints you can keep a bit level backup with several versions that never exceeds say 150% of your original data.
 
What i am thinking i guess is partition backups.... where each partition is a FULL OS backup image...i just didnt' know if... say that OS partition is 80gigs if that image is going to be 80 gigs or maybe compressed and put into 40 or anything like that?

But at the time i wrote this i was thinking (and still am at the moment) about images of my stuff... so if i mess it up i can use somet type system to reload partitions/os images.
 
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