[friendlygiant]

I am going to back up my entire system on to an external portable hard drive. My question is could I then take this drive and copy someone else's music library onto it for back-up purposes (from a different pc)? Could this back up be taken off (As a seperate entity to my stuff) should the other person have a disaster? As you can probably tell, I am a complete novice when it comes to back-up dos and don'ts !!

[Daedroth]

Get a drive large enough and you can store your backup and the other persons music on it fine. However you are staking all your backups on that one drive. What if it were to fail, your backup would then be lost. (Always good to have more than one backup source)

Do you have the software to backup your system? When you say you're going to back up the entire system...do you mean taking a system image, an exact copy of what it is like now? Or are you going to just backup your documents/pictures/music only? Or are you going to backup the operating system only?

[friendlygiant]

Originally Posted by Daedroth

Get a drive large enough and you can store your backup and the other persons music on it fine. However you are staking all your backups on that one drive. What if it were to fail, your backup would then be lost. (Always good to have more than one backup source)

Do you have the software to backup your system? When you say you're going to back up the entire system...do you mean taking a system image, an exact copy of what it is like now? Or are you going to just backup your documents/pictures/music only? Or are you going to backup the operating system only?

I am hoping to do a system image--an exact copy.

[chrisjr]

What I have is a Seagate Network drive plugged into my router. The Seagate has a USB socket, plugged into which I have a Western Digital USB drive.

The Seagate drive came with a basic back-up program which runs in the background on each computer attached to the network. It copies essential files to a user specific area on the drive, each computer has it's own private area on the disk.

I also use Macrium Reflect free to do a full system image. The Seagate "control panel" has a facility to copy files and folders from the Seagate drive to the USB drive. So every so often I copy the files to the USB drive giving me a second safety copy.

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/externa...e/goflex-home/
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

The Seagate software sits quietly in the background copying important data files so it's basically set and forget. Then if I make some serious change to the computers (eg new software installation) or just when I feel like it I run Macrium to back-up the entire machine.

Probably better ways to do it but it works for me

[friendlygiant]

Originally Posted by chrisjr

What I have is a Seagate Network drive plugged into my router. The Seagate has a USB socket, plugged into which I have a Western Digital USB drive.

The Seagate drive came with a basic back-up program which runs in the background on each computer attached to the network. It copies essential files to a user specific area on the drive, each computer has it's own private area on the disk.

I also use Macrium Reflect free to do a full system image. The Seagate "control panel" has a facility to copy files and folders from the Seagate drive to the USB drive. So every so often I copy the files to the USB drive giving me a second safety copy.

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/externa...e/goflex-home/
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

The Seagate software sits quietly in the background copying important data files so it's basically set and forget. Then if I make some serious change to the computers (eg new software installation) or just when I feel like it I run Macrium to back-up the entire machine.

Probably better ways to do it but it works for me

Wow!! Thanks Chris but you've just blown my mind!! You're talking to a novice silver surfer here!

[c4rv]

When you take a system image then the result is a single big file, you can copy this file to anywhere you want. External hard drive, USB storage, NAS / network storage, DVD (if the image is small enough) or even cloud storage. You will also need a process to recover the image back to hard drive. This is usually in form of a bootable CD with recovery software. Personally I use Acronis which also allows to access files from within the image file.

For keeps files in sync with an external device, have a look at something like puresync.

http://www.jumpingbytes.com/en/puresync.html

[Magic Cottage]

Windows 7 has a built in system image tool and in our experience works perfectly. We actually had to use it on one of our PC's recently. Everything was back up and running very quickly.

We also make separate backups of the documents folder to a different external drive as a sort of belt and braces for data.

Backing up to the cloud is a pain if you only have 'standard' broadband. It's too slow.

[chrisjr]

Originally Posted by friendlygiant

Wow!! Thanks Chris but you've just blown my mind!! You're talking to a novice silver surfer here!

The hardest part of all this is physically taking all the bits out of the box and sticking them together. Then just run the install CD on each computer you want to use and the next hardest part is thinking up a user name for each of them

It is pretty simple to set up and once done you just forget about it. The software runs in the background and as long as it can see the network drive just gets on with the job of copying stuff over. You can more or less forget it's there.

The other bits, ie doing a System image regularly and copying from the Network drive to a USB drive are not absolutely essential. Though having a second copy of your data is never a bad idea.

A system image is not absolutely essential. If Windows does throw it's toys out of the pram there are options for getting it back. Even if that involves a trip down to PC World and buying a copy of Windows.

Far more important is all your personal data that cannot be so easily restored. Especially if the only copy in existence is on your laptop hard drive. I suspect most people would far rather lose Windows than the only remaining photos of a much loved, no longer alive, relative for example.

[Daedroth]

For what you need, Magic Cottage's suggestion of using Windows 7's built in backup facility is good enough for what you need.

If you aren't on Windows 7, then you could get Arconis TrueImage 2010, which is an older version, but cheap and very good. That will be more than good enough for your needs.

[anniebrion]

Originally Posted by Daedroth

For what you need, Magic Cottage's suggestion of using Windows 7's built in backup facility is good enough for what you need.

If you aren't on Windows 7, then you could get Arconis TrueImage 2010, which is an older version, but cheap and very good. That will be more than good enough for your needs.

EaseUS Todo Backup Workstation Free is also good though lacking some of the features of TrueImage, but has an advantage of working under W8

[friendlygiant]

Thanks to everyone for your replies.........you've been a great help

[JohnGeek]

Try Handy Backup 7, it's easy to use backup software for novices, it can do system backup very well.

[Zenith]

Originally Posted by c4rv

...Personally I use Acronis which also allows to access files from within the image file...

As does Macrium Reflect.