External HD and Backing Up Query

[Scutch]

I bought a Freecom external HD (400GB) a few months ago. As some of you may recall, it gave up the ghost shortly after, stupid click click clicking noise with a lot of my saved documents and files on there ultimately lost.

Anyway, I'm planning on buying another, as my laptop is once again zapped for space.

If I move most of my work to the external HD, and also save new files to it too, what is the brief on backing up these files so I wont lose them again should the HD fail?

Can I backup all the data on the external HD to store on my laptop? How does it work? Especially if its a 400GB HD, how does it back it all up and compress the files so much? Also, what is the best backup software I can use?

Cheers.

 

[JoelDee]

Ghost / NT Backup

 

[Scutch]

Cheers Joel. My main point needs answered though. Can I backup 100/200/300 etc GB's of stuff on a 60GB laptop HD, so I know I have it stored incase the external HD goes tittybangbang?

I mean, there's no point in backing up all my information on the external if its going to f*ck up. That would mean I've lost both the backup info and the files.

 

[b3nje]

Cheers Joel. My main point needs answered though. Can I backup 100/200/300 etc GB's of stuff on a 60GB laptop HD, so I know I have it stored incase the external HD goes tittybangbang?

I mean, there's no point in backing up all my information on the external if its going to f*ck up. That would mean I've lost both the backup info and the files.

As in compression?

Compressing 300GB to 60GB would be fun :> you find something to do it, you let us all know!

Get another EX HDD - for £50 you can get 500GB...probably worth it as well

 

[KDF]

Buy a 1TB external drive with built in RAID1 (mirror) if a drive fails you have an up to date backup drive which you can recover from.

Gives you just under 500GB effective usable space.

 

[Scutch]

How much is one of those bad boys?

 

[JoelDee]

Is your hard drive full?

 

[Scutch]

Is your hard drive full?

I have an 70gb hard drive on my laptop, which is full. I bought a Freecom 400gb external, which got to around 150gb in a couple of weeks before conking out.

I need a new HD. I was going to buy another Freecom 400gb one, but I would want to back up my data this time. Just dont see the point of backing it up onto the same external drive if its going to fail again.

 

[KDF]

How much is one of those bad boys?

There were about 300 each when I got 3 of them, should be cheaper now though.

 

[DazG]

I was looking at a 1Tb raided external HDD a few weeks ago. I thought it was a little overkill to backup up Itunes library :rasp:

I bought a 320 Gb Western Digital one instead, no problems so far!

Here are the drives I was looking at

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/search/index.html?rb=0&strSearch=&strOrderBy=decSellPriceExcVat&strOrderDir=descending&bolShowAll=true&intStoreID=2&intCatID=4&intSubcatUID=128&minprice=151.0&maxprice=549.0&bolShowAll=true

Some of them are a little overkill