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Backing Up My Hardrive

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Backing Up My Hardrive

Postby Angel37 » Sat Aug 18, 2007 12:25 am

My laptop recently gave me an overheating scare so I'd like to back her up. Is there anyway to do this freely on-line or must it be done on CD? The problem with this is my laptop doesn't burn DVDs and there's waaay too much stuff on her for a CD. Any alternatives that are cheap/free?
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Postby Warrior4Christ » Sat Aug 18, 2007 12:58 am

A reliable, fast, sure, not-quite-as-cheap method, would be to back up onto an external hard disk (on firewire or USB).
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Postby mechana2015 » Sat Aug 18, 2007 9:34 am

External hard drive is your best bet, for safety, speed, reliability and recoverability. Drives of this sort are now less than a dollar a Gig, and are by far the most efficiant backup tool.
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Postby Raiden no Kishi » Sat Aug 18, 2007 7:56 pm

The only "free" way online to do it that I can think of would be to transfer your files to a friend's server over the Internets, and that would take heinous amounts of time and dumb luck. External hard drives FTW.

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Postby Shao Feng-Li » Mon Aug 20, 2007 5:43 am

If you have a friend with any storage devices, you might wanna ask. But I know how you feel... my laptop can only read DVDs...
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Postby termyt » Mon Aug 20, 2007 8:06 am

I assume you are speaking of just copying the data, not creating an image to restore your entire laptop, should it fail.

I agree an external hard drive is the best. You can even image your laptop onto the external drive and do a complete restore of your machine, if you wanted to go that route.

The cheapest way is to burn a lot of CD's. At the very least, you could categorize them so you know easily what's on which CD. This will also help you up date you back-up. If you know where a new file belongs, then you only need to re-burn that CD.

Another choice is to use a flash drive. I've seen 4 Gig drives for less than $50. If you have more than 4 gig worth of data to store, this quickly becomes both a pain to manage and a bit cost-prohibitive in comparison to getting an external HD.
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