Can you tell me what program you use to back up your pc hard drive? I have an external HD and want to copy everything to the HD so I can get the laptop back to the exact state as before, if so required
Acronis Trueimage is the tool for that particular task Mike. But you want to also be on a continuous migration of your dynamic content to some web storage, so that combined Acronis can restore your system to a point in time and the dynamic content is an up to the minute up to date live archive and can be brought back from the web. Look at Microsoft Live Mesh for 5GB of free synchronised storage, documents are volatile and change a lot but photo's are pretty static you just need to keep up with recent ones, so photos should be in the Acronis external drive backup and documents should be in the live backup on Live Mesh or something similar. If you have a Western Digital external drive you will get a decent version of Acronis for free from WD's site. Personally it's not what I do, I have always maintained multiple machines synchronised as best I can and in 25 years I've never lost anything important, the motto is keep your data on the move no one form of storage is safe.
I echo what oss says here - Acronis is the best for this type of task. I've used Acronis for years, its never let me down, and I schedule a back up once a week on to my WD external hard drive.
Thanks Jim, Do you have the link for the Acronis software on the WD site? I have three WD external drives. I had a look before and couldn't see anything on their site. The 5GB cloud storage wouldn't really help me as my laptop has 400 GB of stuff on it.
I'd love to try this Rob. I bought a 3TB Seagate external drive the other week and tried to use the Microsoft backup but it kept failing part of the way through
Weekly, I just use Windows 7 back-up software to create a hard disk image and to back-up my data folders (including videos and photos) Of course, this requires manual intervention as the hard disk resides in a data-proof fire-chest which lives inside the fire-proof safe. I don't attempt any synchronisation to local back-up. Daily, all data folders (except photos and videos) are automatically synchronised to the 'cloud' on www.idrive.com - all fully encrypted (on the client side) and free.
5GB of cloud storage is still useful - just automate the synchronisation of a limited number of folders (documents e-mails etc) on a daily basis and do a system image back-up on a weekly basis, or any time you add files which are not synchronised to the cloud). That way, you can never lose more than one day of data.
Here it is Mike :- http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119 It takes a complete restorable image, sometimes this will mean it has to run while Windows is shut down, so it loads a Linux Kernel to run itself. It is quite capable of taking an image of multiple logical drives at the same time. Regards your 400GB, yeah it won't do that but there are very very few people that have 5GB of personal documents, for example word and excel documents, Live Mesh is not for storage of programs but for storage of important bits an pieces. You choose specific folders that you wish to have sync'd, I would not use it for photos and the likes but only for the stuff that changes more quickly as it is a real time sync solution. (ah sorry Howerd just realised you had already explained this )
Until last week I only backed-up to a local hard drive but there are many good 'cloud' solutions available now and my Windows 7 back-up does not remind me enough - just a little marker in the system tray to remind me. If I am gonna travel to the Philippines once my fiancée gets her annulment I need to be able to access the data anyway. But our whole relationship could be in doubt if the Government does impose new rules on income for sponsors.
The main problem with cloud backup is that in reality it takes months to upload any serious amount of stuff even when the accounts have very high storage limits. I used Humyo for a while but never got above about 5 GB even though it had a 100 GB limit at the time. For photographs I use Flickr it took me about 50 to 70 days to upload about 20,000 photos for archival purposes, the days were spread out over a few years but I made a major effort last year using the highest speed lines I could get hold of to upload just about everything related to the Phils. I still have another 15000 shots that are not Phils related and sadly Flickr does not cater for RAW files only jpeg and TIFF so my digital negatives are only as safe as my backup and sync routine. For code I use a combination of my secure encrypted service, Live Mesh and an SVN account but I am writing a replacement for Live Mesh (and the secure encrypted service I use) that will give me a bit more selective control over what gets backed up. For anything personal and document related I copy it to my secure encrypted service as it is the safest thing I have apart from the fact that they might go out of business For Installation archives of my tools like my Windows 2003 server install disks or Windows 2008 R2 install disks, I mostly have the original disks in the Phils and ISO image copies on various machines here in the UK both at home and at work.
I live in a small village - three miles from the local exchange - the best upload speed I have ever achieved is around 0.5 Gig, but a local company is soon to offer broadband over a microwave link (I think that is what it is). They managed to recruit the Parish Council into promoting the scheme; in my opinion, the Parish Council have not looked at other options. The company is even giving its 'sales pitch' at the village hall next week! I think they are talking of a synchronous connection of around 10 Gig.
I know a chap that offers exactly that service up in Cumbria, it works and it is a good solution where all the other services are poor and unlikely to improve. It's not as cheap as other services but it is good. Sadly Wimax seems to have died a death
Yes, it does work and can be a real boon for businesses who are located on out-of-town industrial estate and need a fast connection. I don't think it is true Wimax. In our village they have mounted the dish at a local factory site, which should give pretty good coverage for residents.
We've all been using microwaves to talk to each other for donkeys years Dom, when I lived in Scotland you could see the dish on the side of the village exchange. Telcos having been using them for donkeys for point to point line of sight comms instead of wires.
Thanks for the comments. Looks like the Acronis from WD is only to backup to WD drives (mine is a Seagate 3TB) and the Windows 7 backup keeps failing so I will look at buying the Acronis Trueimage
Found the 2012 version for just £20 from Kikatek http://www.kikatek.com/product_info.php?products_id=206647&source=froogle
I used it against a Hitachi drive Mike, I cloned the contents of a WD drive onto the Hitachi, not checked the imaging features but I would have thought it would work. Acronis is about 40 quid if you buy it from them rather than using the free edition.
Anyone can actually hold microwave waveguides http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waveguide_(electromagnetism) as there is an effect called "skin effect" that means troughs and peaks in the e/m waves cancel out at the inside metal face. However I believe, as we were told as radar techs, standing in front of big dishes can make a man impotent. I never tested this although I was up many ships' and oil rigs masts etc. and still had kids, so I suppose I must have kept a safe distance.
