Complete Backup

N

nomis78

New Member
hi, first time posting but im hoping you can help

i am wanting to create an entire system backup for my laptop, the reason is i have had my system for 1 year. i have used around 220GB of an available 268GB

I a photographer and a hard drive failure would be catastrophic for myself and clients. i need a way to back up EVERYTHING, including nearly 80GB of photos and 60GB of music.

is the best way to just copy my entire C drive to an external unit or is there some other way of doing it that is better.

(Also if anyone can recomend anything that would show me where there is clutter i could possibly erase i would appreciate it)
 
Last edited:
Wow, you have a lot of pictures. your going to need a external usb hard drive.
i would say 500 gig. it would have been nice if you would have had a extended partition on the drive to keep the pictures and anything else seperate from the operating system for back up purpose. i would still add an extended partition on the usb drive. Nero would be good for data backup like pictures etc. Acronis true image works well for backing up the operating system. that was the 1st thing i did. (try it). at least its a place to start.

as far as clean up you can get some freeware CCleaner from www.ccleaner.com
This is good for some general housekeeping. (cleanup).

might as well try freeware Defragler from the same sight for defragging the hard drive.
 
tremmor said:
Wow, you have a lot of pictures. your going to need a external usb hard drive.
i would say 500 gig. it would have been nice if you would have had a extended partition on the drive to keep the pictures and anything else seperate from the operating system for back up purpose. i would still add an extended partition on the usb drive. Nero would be good for data backup like pictures etc. Acronis true image works well for backing up the operating system. that was the 1st thing i did. (try it). at least its a place to start.

as far as clean up you can get some freeware CCleaner from www.ccleaner.com
This is good for some general housekeeping. (cleanup).

might as well try freeware Defragler from the same sight for defragging the hard drive.
Click to expand...

thanks for the informaton, i have looked to partition my drive before but i couldnt get it to work, i don't know if it was a software error or if it was me that just didnt understand everything.

The programs that you list, are they free/cheap as i dont have much money to play with at the moment, if not could you recomend any other alternatives.

I allready have and use CCleaner but did not know about defragler, i shall have a look into it.

and yes, alot of pictures its comes with the job unfortunately. also would a 250GB hard drive suffice? I allready have an Ex. HD that is 250GB could i not just use this? i was looking at buying a 1TB drive later this year so dont really want to fork out for another drive if its not Abosolutely nescercery.

Sorry if im asking too many questions, i haven't dealt with backup before (or at least not on this scale)
 
i will take a look here. this has talked about many times here just using windows. i will have to get back later.
 
The external drive would be the way to go. Personally, I would invest in a two drive enclosure that I could set up as RAID 1. In such an arrangement there are two identical drives. When you write to the RAID the two drives mirror each other. In other words, they have exactly the same data. If a drive crashes (they all do eventually) you simply remove it and replace it with a fresh one. It will format itself and mirror the other drive automatically and you're back to RAID 1 security. Those image files are your living. You can't short change yourself when it comes to protecting it. Believe me, all hard drives crash if they are used long enough.
 
I allready have an Ex. HD that is 250GB could i not just use this?
Click to expand...

Why not , at least you will have some sort of back up of your files.
I also keep a 200 gig in the draw well away from my PC, because theft or loss of a laptop/desktop should also be taken into account.
 
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