Windows 7: Best Back Up Solution: Advice wanted.

Hi All,

I have had a bad HDD week and am looking for the best place to back up photo's and personal documents.

ATM I am thinking cloud is the safest??

Cheers Brizee

If it is just files and folders, there are CDs, DVDs, BD disks, flash drive and external HDDs.

There are but these all have the risk of failure as my hdd nearly did this week. Maybe my topic is too broad.

Cheers for responding, Brizee

Optical disks won't fail, but through mishandling can get scratched and be unreadable. I have some CDs that are 8+ years old still working. any mechanical thing may fail at any time. Many members here use 2,3 and 4 hard drives for back up strategies.

The "cloud" as they want to call it, is very insecure and a host where you have data could close down without warning. In the end there is no fail-safe back up.

If your HDD "nearly" failed I suspect you should back up with something and replace it right away. It could completely fail in the next 10 minutes.

Thanks Britton30, I am currently in the process of this, cheers.

Hello Brizee. Just a personal opinion about "the cloud". ( And I'm sure you've heard what they say about opinions. They're like a certain body part. Everybody's got one and they usually stink. )

Anyway, depending on your upload speed and how much data you have, just a few gigabytes can take several hours. I did the computations for my own upload speed and transferring 100GB to the cloud would take me about 2 months if I devoted 8 hours a day to the upload. So time could be a problem. I also prefer to have the storage device available to me so I can pick it up, plug it in, or put it in the CD/DVD tray, and see if the transfer was successful.

My personal experience over a decade or more using desktops is that internal HDDs rarely fail (have had none) but I have had problems with USB drives - particularly the 2.5" ones even when quoted as 'tough' and which have never sustained any shocks. My strategy is to always use at least two internal drives so that data has a copy on at least two (not compressed or related to a specific software) and to also copy to external USB drives - I rotate two of these. I have backed up to DVDs in the past - get the best ones - but I don't bother now. Like others I am dubious of the Cloud but basically I don't have that much data so I can manage with what I have. I backup almost immediately new data arrives on my system so it only takes a few clicks and minutes at most to backup any data but I will admit to not being a heavy data user unlike some.

Thanks marsmimar and pincushion, I appreciate you sharing your experiences.

I recently lost a 3TB out of my HTPC which contained mainly movies, I almost lost a 1TB external drive this week which contained all my photo's and music. My wife would have killed me if I had lost the photo's. I might add the members on this forum assisted me in rescuing the data. (Thanks )

I have 15TB of drives over 3 PC's and am looking to backup 10 - 11 TB so I am trying to find the best solution.

So thanks again for your thoughts.

The best solution is having multiple backups with at least one being offsite. See post #964 here. My backup scheme may seem expensive and a PITA but weight that expense hassle against the value of your data.