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[mywifeshusband]

My Windows XP computer recently had a spell in hospital together with its backup external hard drive. The report came back to me that the PC was now fit and well but the External hard drive was a waste of time and needed replacing together with a purchase of Acronis True Image software to ensure that a proper back up was being achieved. I had been using the Windows XP backup facility to do the backing up but I do have the software that comes with Norton 360 to do the job instead.
Two questions follow having researched available hard drives and the recommended software:- 
Point 1 My existing (out of favour) hard drive is connected via a firewire but I seem only now-a-days to see units with USB2 connectivity. Therefore is Firewire here necessary and if not why did it predominate a year or three back when I made my original purchase?  I think I'm talking here about 500GB being enough for my backups but with 1TB at little extra cost I might as well go for the bigger drive.
Point 2 concerns the recommended software package for it Acronis True Image. The 'on line' reviews for this seem to be either 'very white' or 'very black'. That is Absolutely excellent or completely rubbish. Many of these bad reviews probably come from novices like me who struggle a bit with 'professional' grade software: so what please is the advice from Kits band of volunteer experts.

[broadstairs]

True Firewire seems not to be in favour for external hard drives, USB2 is fast enough. Although I'd consider a Lan connected hard drive if you have more than one PC/Laptop and have a router, that way it can be accessible from any/all PCs at the same time.

I have used Acronis True Image and had no problems with it but I have never had to use any image backups, maybe I'm lucky. When I used Windows a lot it was quite often that I had problems and needed to re-install to clean up things and restoring an image would not have helped much because one which was old enough to not have the problem was too old to be of use.

I do backup important stuff like photos, video, emails, bookmarks, documents and spreadsheets, data from my weather station and some settings. I dont have one large hard drive so I can keep much of this stuff on separate hard disks and my main system runs Linux and I keep all my non system data in separate partitions so a re-install is easier than a restore and probably quicker at least for me. With modern SMART capable hard drives it should be easy to get early warning of hardware failure and take appropriate action.

Stuart

[BritBrat]

Have you thought about using Network-attached storage (NAS)?

Netgear are being sold off quite cheaply right now as they have new models coming on stream.

ebuyer.com ReadyNAS Duo £129.98 you do need to buy drives as well but these are a very good bit of kit.

Use it along with "SyncBack" and a program like "Acronis" and you should be all set.

"Norton Ghost" is another good program and I use a similar piece of software "Symantec Backup Exec".

But you can use what ever works for you so long as you test the backup before needed.

Now would be a good time to do a backup knowing the computer is as it should be.  What I have done in the past is install the operating system and have the computer running then I would make an image of it.

Next I would install all drivers and make another image.

Then later when I had all my normall programs installed make another image.

That way I could restore computer back to a fresh install or one including drivers and or software it also gives you three images to use should one fail.

Sounds like a lot of hard work but when I want to restore system I can now do it in  a few hours or even a lot less.

As for your old drive do you know what is inside it? as you could remove the drive and put it in in a USB caddy and save landfill.

[tonyappuk]

Recently I had to back up my system to transfer to a larger drive (only£40 for 1 TB, incredible) I found a linux program G4L that did the job perfectly. Don't be put off by the Linux tag, it's a bootable disk and there are help files with it. And of course it's free!
Tony

[oldfogy]

1. Have you thought about using Network-attached storage (NAS)?

2. "Norton Ghost" is another good program and I use a similar piece of software "Symantec Backup Exec".

a) What I have done in the past is install the operating system and have the computer running then I would make an image of it.

b) Next I would install all drivers and make another image.

c) Then later when I had all my normal programs installed make another image.

d) That way I could restore computer back to a fresh install or one including drivers and or software it also gives you three images to use should one fail.

3. Sounds like a lot of hard work but when I want to restore system I can now do it in  a few hours or even a lot less.

4. As for your old drive do you know what is inside it? as you could remove the drive and put it in in a USB caddy and save landfill.

1. I recently purchased a Iomega 4TB Nas-Box, although I will say it does the job, but I'm not 100% happy with it.
    I think what I personally wanted or needed was a "Server" (Not a backup device).
    If you notice these types of devices are mainly advertised as The ideal backup solution" .

2. a - d.
    What can you add to that, nothing, best choice around, but then again after using Ghost for the last xx years I
    am probably a wee bit biased in it's favour.
    I do a Partition image backup each month, that way I only have to re-install anything that was installed the
    previous month if I have to do a re-image install.
    (Please note I did say "Partition Image" and not "Drive Image" which may account for the difference in time)

3. A complete re-image of my C: Partition takes on average 5 to 10 minutes.
    This consists of the Operating system (XP) and all my various video editing programs and a whole multitude of
    small programs.

4. Sometimes a "Low Level Format" can and will revive a previously dead drive. (If it can be accessed)
    It costs nothing to do as the software is usually available from the HDD manufactures web sit.

[BritBrat]

1. I recently purchased a Iomega 4TB Nas-Box, although I will say it does the job, but I'm not 100% happy with it.
    I think what I personally wanted or needed was a "Server" (Not a backup device).
    If you notice these types of devices are mainly advertised as The ideal backup solution" .

You can FTP and torrent with the Readynas duo.

Not sure if that is what you need.

If you wanted to stream from it but not very well, but the newer faster versions should be fine,  But to be honnest if it was me I would build a server from scratch using a H55 Micro ATX motherboard with an i3 processor and something like this in the front of the case.

[oldfogy]

Basically all I wanted was a central storage area for my 3 computers as I was finding I was having three of everything being stored, and some files such as accounts then had to be updated on each PC or else 2 copies were out of date.

Yes this is what I now have, but when shortcuts had been placed on the desktop cleanup software was removing them as they maybe were not connected at that particular time. (Nas box drives set to go into sleep mode after one hour)
But I will say, at the moment it and I are still going through a learning process to iron out the "Operator Error" problems.

Don't know/understand the FTP bit, but it does have the capability for torrenting, although I had a quickish look and did not understand that bit either, so will continue to use uTorrent which I fully understand and like.

One of the things that was putting me of with some of the various types of gadgets, such as the one you link to is that I was trying not to have to leave too many things running at the same time.
Although I have in one respect done what I set out to do by centralising all my files.
But this Iomega Nas box 4 TB (2x2TB drives), has a very low power consumption and is more than able to stream from (it's also gigabite compatible)

Unlike the Iomega Media centre which was not gigabite compatible and trying to transfer 2 TB of movie files over to it was a absolute nightmare, not too mention most of it's built-in other functions did not work and although the problems had been reported as long as ago as 7 months Iomega still have not issued a firmware update "shame on them" and has since been returned and replaced with a Western Digital Live Media player.


***********
Sorry for taking this OT
So back to mywifeshusband for some ore thoughts and comments.

[BritBrat]

In that case I would go with the same hardware I said above and use Windows Home Server software.

You can set times to come on and off (using addons) and may even be able to wake on LAN, also it has redundancy so if a drive went down you would not lose the data.

The gadget I linked to is just an empty drive box that fits into 3 bays of a case but allows five harddrives to be installed in it and easily removable from the front and swaped out live.

Eample:
wegotserved.com

[oldfogy]

1. I recently purchased a Iomega 4TB Nas-Box, although I will say it does the job, but I'm not 100% happy with it.
    I think what I personally wanted or needed was a "Server" (Not a backup device).
    If you notice these types of devices are mainly advertised as The ideal backup solution" .

In that case I would go with the same hardware I said above and use Windows Home Server software.

A bit too late now because as I said above I have already purchased something.

[mywifeshusband]

Thanks folks! You completely lost me several post back but I'm happy to have stimulated such an engrossing conversation.