what programme do you recommend for backing up?

[John Singh]

Are you talking about burning to CD?

Nero software is very good
You just click and drag into the ‘burning room’ the files you require

You can do multi session as well

John

[Bill Dewison]

There are 101 programs out there to backup Terry, but as John says, Nero burn is one of the best for backing up direct to a CDR. You could also buy a Zip Drive (available at most computer shops) which gives you a removable drive. All you do is copy your work to it and you end up with a cartridge with all your work on 😀 Really easy and takes all the work out of backing up. You can setup your shortcuts to allow a right-click on a file and copy it direct to your zipdrive I think (not tried this yet) but it certainly makes short work of keeping all those files.

I may be preaching to the converted, but its wise to always keep a backup of your work away from your main workplace as well. I keep 3 backups now, one at work, one at home and one in a place even the pixies won’t find 😉 Just guards against fires, break-ins and the other mishaps that can happen. It was quite hard work to get into the routine, but worth it to know I have all my files safe and sound.

Cheers, Dewi

[Robert Lambie]

we made all our work machines carry a 100mb zip drive each.
its basicaly a floppy disk (little thicker) it just appears like the floppy drive. instead of save to floppy you save to zip.. unlike a CD you dont need to burn it. just drag and drop and its instant like the floppy. because its 100mb you get tons of stuff stored & easy move about.

for cd’s nero is good, i use some funky named french one thats dead easy to use, but i cant say it never mind spell it so ill no bother. 😳

i think backing up and storing it is best on CD or DVD. i do this for the site and computer. every month or so i save c: drive to a dvd and date it. then just continue working with comp as usual.
i also regularly backup the website, even though the server folk do this too, better safe than sorry. 😉

[Andy Gorman]

I wonder how many people don’t take backing up very seriously? Or never get round to it? I had a hard disk go belly up a couple of weeks ago. It does happen. Fortunately, I had backed up to CD a day or so before so the loss was minimal. One thing I also backup that maybe you wouldn’t ordinarily think of: YOUR FONTS FOLDER. As a corel user I use TTF fonts and would have a nightmare of a job trying to track all of the fonts I had installed on an ‘as needed’ basis. Just a thought.

By the way, I use Nero, very simple. The bundled XP CD writing software doesn’t even work on my PC! Good old Micro$oft.

[juddr]

another option which we have been using for about 6 months now is those USB memory sticks, I have a 1GB version now which i backup all the really important stuff onto, ive just got an icon in the taskbar which executes a robocopy to the USB memory, ive got this attached to my key ring so that its never left at work while im out, a poormans offsite backup i guess.

[Tim Painter]

to help guard against data loss having a system with RAID is a good idea especially with the price of hard drives so low now.

Just my pennys worth :lol1:

Tim.

[Carrie Brown]

Thought I would add our bit 😀

It does depend what you wish to back up.

Usb sticks are a great idea, but you are still limited to the size of memory on the stick and they can be more expensive than cdr’s, but on the plus side you can save your work and take it home and work from there.

If your looking at an entire system back up I would recommend DVD’s or CDR’s.

When we started our sales/design system (which contains all the designs from past and present jobs) would only fill half a cd, we are now looking at a dvd burner as you can fit 4.3gb on them, over 9gb on a double sided dvd!!! Nero is probably the easiest to use as burning software goes with a simple drag and drop interface.

Stephen & Carrie

[Tim Painter]

Im just going that direction myself looking at buying a DVD writer dual layer – prices keep dropping and specs keep increasing.

I remember the first CDR burner I bought cost me £250 and it was only a 2x drive. Pick em up with a gallon of oil these days.

Any particular DVD writers caught your eyes Carrie / Stephen?

Tim.

[Cookster]

We use a 40 gig USB external hard drive, you can buy them now for around 60 quid. We also use GHOST which creates a mirror image of your main hard drive so if it all goes T*TS UP you don’t have to rebuild your computer.

John

[J. Hulme]

quote Cookster:

We use a 40 gig USB external hard drive, you can buy them now for around 60 quid.
John

You can also use a normal large hard drive and connect it to your second IDE channel and run it parallel to your C drive, same thing as cookster but I’m not a fan of USB, maybe because the work PC’s usb doesn’t really work as it should 😥

[Adrian Hewson]

We use maxtor one touch optical drives with firewire connection (IEEE1394). We use two 300Gb versions one stays in the office and the other comes home with me.

With the one touch system once you have set up the parameters you only press the button each night and it does the rest. As they are firewire you can just disconnect them and carry them home.
NOt big not expensive, easy to us and plenty of space. (might seem a bit big to many people but our premises are networked and everybodys work is kept on an optical drive on the server

Rergards Adrian

[Colin Crow]

There is a brilliant little program we have been using for a couple of years called second copy which will back up any part of your hard drive to another local drive or networked drive at any time you specify. It can even just back-up modified files, certain directories etc. you can find it here:

http://www.centered.com/

Since having a hard drive just give up on my server, i now have second drives in every pc and at the end of the day they mirror the first so that when I have a problem i can boot from the spare. Once a week the document files get backed up across the network to an off site pc

[Terry Bull]

What a lot of good advice, thanks everyone I am currently putting all files onto cd’s via Nero
WHAT A MUPPET
it actually come with my system but i didnt realise i had it whoops!
something about not seeing whats under your nose- thanks John

I will be ‘ghosting’ the whole thing soon as I get another h/ drive

Cheers

[Carrie Brown]

Sorry vivid i missed your question, as yet I am stilll looking at drives, to be honest i buy all our stuff off dabs as they also have reader reviews on most of the products. But we do need to upgrade soon as we space is getting thin.

[J. Hulme]

DVD rewriters are amazingly cheap, just make sure you buy the correct
+ /- DVD format discs to couple with the writer.
We have two re-writers and never use any, DVD re-writers take far too much time(at the moment)