Backup your computers—it's worth it

**O'Neille** · 3rd December 07, 12:40 PM

I'm guilty of a little overkill. I have a backup drive installed in my safe. It's wired to my main computer. My laptop backs up to the main computer every night and my main backs up every week. I've never needed it other than when I get a new computer but the peace of mind is wonderful. I got it mostly for my pictures.

**Freelander Sporrano** · 3rd December 07, 12:45 PM

If you are a Mac User. Why not get .Mac Account ? and back up your important stuff to it. I use Time Machine with Leopard and also a Bootable clone.
Plus I back up my Doc's to my iPod... Belt and Braces thats me... er thats braces when not kilted ...

Sorry to hear your woes by the way

**James MacMillan** · 3rd December 07, 12:46 PM

Originally Posted by O'Neille

I'm guilty of a little overkill. I have a backup drive installed in my safe. It's wired to my main computer. My laptop backs up to the main computer every night and my main backs up every week. I've never needed it other than when I get a new computer but the peace of mind is wonderful. I got it mostly for my pictures.

Now that's an idea. I have a fireproof G

n safe that should have plenty of room. But I don't know about drilling a hole for the cable? That would almost positively defeat the fire-proofedness of the G

n safe.

**O'Neille** · 3rd December 07, 01:54 PM

Jay, That is where my back up drive is. My safe has a cool wiring pass through that was installed at the factory for an alarm connection. It also has power inside for the light. So it was no problem to put the hard drive in there and run a usb cable to the computer. I just turn on the power strip to keep the hard drive from running continuously.

**James MacMillan** · 3rd December 07, 01:58 PM

Originally Posted by O'Neille

Jay, That is where my back up drive is. My safe has a cool wiring pass through that was installed at the factory for an alarm connection. It also has power inside for the light. So it was no problem to put the hard drive in there and run a usb cable to the computer. I just turn on the power strip to keep the hard drive from running continuously.

I have an alarm connection also, but no power inside. The alarm connection is on the outside, and is tied to a switch on the door. No integrity is broken.

In my mind - The external, USB drive, is by far the best (current) way to back-up data.

**Ian.MacAllan** · 3rd December 07, 03:34 PM

One beatitude unaccountably omitted from the Sermon on the Mount:

"Blessed are the pessimists, for they make backups."

.

**kiltedinUSMC** · 3rd December 07, 05:41 PM

My computer caught a virus and crashed so I on a friends until I can get it fix. Thanks for the warning I'm kinda in the same boat

**Kilted_John** · 4th December 07, 12:25 AM

Matt, BTDT... Had an old Mac Centris 650 (one of the old 68040 machines) with a 230MB hard drive. Was chatting on AOL Instant Messenger. Sometime during my online session, AIM crashed, and froze the computer. Nothing would work. So, I did the three-finger salute, and rebooted it. Got the floppy disk icon with the flashing "?". Tried rebooting again. Still no dice. Zapped the PRAM, did everything I could. I could hear the drive spin up, but it wouldn't boot. So, popped in the Disk Tools floppy. Computer booted up. Couldn't find the hard drive, except in Drive Setup. Drive was shown as being unformatted. So, nuked, and repaved. Had to restore everything with what I had from three years prior.

The drive crashed a second time, about two months later. Popped it in an older Mac IIci that I still owned. That machine booted the drive just fine. Reinstalled it in the 650. Worked fine. Wish I had known about that the first time around. Anyway, I have three drives in my G3, one with 10.4.10, and two with 9.2.2 on them. Also run DiskWarrior whenever the computer gets unstable, so I don't wind up having the boot blocks on the drive get nuked again. I've also stopped using AOL Instant Messenger. Just don't trust it anymore.

-J

**Erisianmonkey** · 4th December 07, 12:52 AM

I had a scare myself this last weekend. My XP drive caught a virus. I had 1699 infected files.

No typo there either. One-thousand six-hundred ninety-nine!! Almost every executable on my system. Luckily it was not a virus that infects the MBR. I was able to save most of my documents through backing up uninfected files to my wife's computer, but I lost programs that are almost impossible to find that I've lost the disks for. On top of that, the stock CPU cooler in my machine quit and I had to replace it to stop my computer from singing the processor overheat aria. The only good thing that came out of it was that the cooler I replaced it with keeps the CPU at the same temp as the motherboard. No fried processor for me!

**canawler** · 4th December 07, 06:55 AM

OK. OK. I've known I needed to do this but just never seemed to get around to it. This thread finally convinced me it was time. Last night I went out and bought an external USB drive (320 GB for $89 at Office Max.)

I don't know a lot about this kind of thing so I have a few questions. First, no software or instructions came with the hard drive so I was poking around on the computer and I was wondering if the Windows backup program on XP would work well for this? Once in the backup program, is it better to chose the option to backup only the My Documents information (pictures, music, etc.) and favorites lists or the option to backup the entire hard drive (and create a boot disk)?