What is the best solution to back up my 80GB hard drive?

[cavemangrinder]

Yeah, EIDE is the same as (P)ATA. Though, alot of the external enclosures support both PATA and SATA hdds just read the package before you buy. If you are gonna do the RAID thing, get SATA drives.

 

[mitts2010]

Yeah, EIDE is the same as (P)ATA. Though, alot of the external enclosures support both PATA and SATA hdds just read the package before you buy. If you are gonna do the RAID thing, get SATA drives.

How do I do RAID? I havent looked into it much? And is that older hard drive still good to use?

 

[Rudster8161]

you have to have a SATA HDD to do the RAID thing, although it would be unlikely that the external HDD went haywire,

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136187
you could get that and backup everything on there, then put it in a fire proof safe.

 

[cavemangrinder]

I would recommend getting a hdd bigger than 80gb to back up your stuff, that way you have room to add more to it in future back ups and dont run out of space. Maybe like 120gb will be good.

How do I do RAID? I havent looked into it much? And is that older hard drive still good to use?

If you want to use RAID, you need 2 hard drives. You can set them up with RAID 1(Mirroring), this enables you to have 2 exact identical hdds for ultimate safety storage. however, if you have 2 120gb drives, you only actually have 120gb of storage because data is written to them simultaneously . If 1 of them ever dies, you still have an exact identical copy on the other drive!

 

[muz]

Heres what i would do , Back up all the important info onto an external hdd once every month and store this offsite , such as a friend or realitives house or even the bank if needs be
And have another external HDD you jhave cpnnected to the pc all the time which you back up onto at least once every week , that way the most you will ever loose is a months data
I wouldnt say DVD's for the fact that it wil get costly in the end and also it takes time to burn that many DVD's
There are also backup programs which will only copy accross stuff wihch you have added since the last back up
I would dismiss online storage for them volumes of data right away as the time taken to both upload and in the event of it being required download that data could take a while so not realy a good choice