my seagate external came with it’s own. did you check to see if your external came with something?
Depends on the type of drive. I can recommend Acronis TrueImage, which handles every file system, has full USB and FireWire support and even allows network backup. Newer versions shoudl also support eSATA drives.
Mylenium
I can recommend Acronis TrueImage
Seconded.
Been running IT departments for 15 years.
Hands down, the best consumer product is EMC retrospect. It is actually an enterprise solution, but can be purchased for "residential" use at a far lower cost. It is not cheep, but can support such a wide variety of media and backup strategies that it is worth the price.
Personally I don’t like the "USB-type" backup solutions. One of the first issues: they directly connected to your computer. If you get a lightning hit, you could loose everything. This happened to me three years ago. 5000 images down-the-drain.
Now, I backup to an NAS RAID 5 array stored in the basement. Disk and switches are cheep. Data is priceless.
H
Thanks, Hugh. I’m always nervous about lighting strikes. I keep my back up HD’s unplugged and disconnected. I only plug and connect them when backing up, and I never do that during a storm. I keep a third backup HD in the bank vault, update that monthly. But, I’m also thinking about adding online storage. Do you know of any good companies to use, I’m looking for 400GB for myself, and 400GB for my husband. Is this feasable, does it cost a fortune, and what about security, people having access to my date? I’m going to post this question again, under a new subject.
Ellen
Acronis backup to a dedicated internal drive and that copied to a usb/firewire drive.
I trust that array stored in the basement is running off of battery power and files are transferred via a wireless network. 🙂
How would it be immune from a lightning strike if it is connected to the same power circuits and ethernet lines as your computer?
Well, I looked into all of the suggested programs from this thread, and went with Jim’s suggestion, the free version of SyncBack. Thanks, Jim. One question I have for you, I set it up to verify that files are copied correctly (In the copy/delete tab). However, during backup, in the progress column, all it shows is scan and copy, not verify. Am I missing something here? My previous system, the older Retrospect 5.6, it would scan, copy, and verify, and it showed all the steps being done.