New found love for Windows Backup

[InsaneNutter]

Im sure we all think about backing up however always put it off until another day, or backup then forget to backup for the next 6 months.

That was the case for my parents PC anyway, just before Christmas i upgraded them to Windows 7 and in the process set Windows to automatically backup the C:\Users folder and the Our Pictures and Our Videos folders my parents had on a septate 500gb drive. The backup was scheduled to run every Sunday at 6pm.

Im really glad I set that up as two weeks ago the 500gb drive they had with photos and videos dating back to 2002 failed, however Windows had mirrored all there data on to an external 500gb.

Today the replacement 500gb drive arrived and i was easily able to restore the backup from the external drive to the drive in there computer. I even had a couple of backups from different dates I could restore.

Yes my parents did have other backups not on that drive however they were at least 6 months old so thats a fair amount of stuff to loose for people who take a lot of photos each month.

Just thaught I would share this short story, If you have Vista or Windows 7 take 5 mins to go to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Backup and Restore and set Windows to backup your important files today.

You will not notice Windows backing up and you might be really glad you did some day

 

[Titcher]

I know it's not the same, but you have considered having them an online private album? Like Picasa, all their photos uploaded to that, it's like having a running backup.

 

[InsaneNutter]

Its not something I had considered, mainly because of the amount of photos they have. Looking at the backup that has finished restoring the photos folder is over 100gb.

I do see the benefits to a backup thats not in the same building as the original, just with upload speeds less than 1mb it would be a right plain to upload 100gigs and actually find somewhere that would store that many photos at a reasonable cost.

 

[Slaz]

I do want to start backing up my files as a schedule someday, for now I just use USB flash drives to manually backup important files.

 

[Safinn]

I should really start backing up files

I have never backed up files. I will regret it when the hard drive fails. Could go at anytime lol.
My other laptop has just completely failed but there was nothing important on it.

 

[InsaneNutter]

Dropbox is really great for backing up those small but essential files you really don't want to loose.

I love the shared folders feature, its great for when we work on Digiex.

 

[BonezOz]

I would absolutely hate it if I lost all of the family photos, but due to not having a spare non-work related external drive, I'm forced to backup all the photo's manually once a month to DVD.

It would suck to lose all of the linux iso's that we have, but those can always be redownloaded if necessary, as can all of my Steam games.