Best methods of backing up your hard drive?

MadMaverick wrote on 5/15/2015, 5:18 AM
I have all my important stuff on a 2 TB external hard drive. I have another hard drive that's identical. One time I copy and pasted everything that was on my hard drive onto my duplicate hard drive. It took countless hours. I was wondering if there was an easier way of doing this? Something that would update regularly? I've heard that there are ways to "clone" your hard drive.

Comments

DGates wrote on 5/15/2015, 5:28 AM
You could go with a RAID set-up that will essentially mirror what you're writing onto 2 discs simultaneously. No need to copy and paste it all later. Although I've never used one, I'm sure others here have.
NickHope wrote on 5/15/2015, 6:14 AM
I mirror drives using SyncBack SE. I then remove the backup drive(s) and keep it away from the computer, where it has less chance of getting destroyed (fire, flood, lightning, virus, theft etc.) along with the original (unlike a mirrored RAID). I also carry backups to the other side of the world every few months. But a mirrored RAID can be a first level of security if it suits your system.

I haven't got an automated or regular backup strategy but probably should have. That's not easy when you travel a lot and the computer is on and off at irregular times. I still tend to rely on the paranoid voice in the back of my mind that says "Done a lot of work recently... better do some backups!".

Edit: It's important to keep some old backups as well as up-to-date ones to reduce the risk of messing something up (e.g. deleting files) and then copying that error to your backups before you realise it. Just the other day I went to a 3-year-old backup of my media archive to retrieve a missing file. There are recommended backup protocols that IT pros use to organise this properly, rather than my fairly random method.
riredale wrote on 5/15/2015, 1:02 PM
Maverick, suggest you do a search on this forum on this topic. Lots of very useful discussion over the years, literally hundreds of contributions.

Lots of ways to clone your C drive so you can restore quickly if something goes wrong. Also lots of ways of copying your non-C drives for archiving. RAID is one way, though I've personally never learned how to do it.
Chienworks wrote on 5/15/2015, 1:54 PM
RAID mirroring is a guard against mechanical failure of the drives. It does not protect you in the slightest from human error. Should you accidentally delete a file or overwrite something you wanted to keep, it's instantly done on all the copies. So, as good and useful as RAID is, it is no substitute for backups. Ideally you should be using both.