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Backup methodology after severe failure of laptop and loss of data
Hi folks after finding this wonderful forum and associated advice already received. I was badly burned by a sever failure on my laptop and can only hold my hands up that I’m guilty of not putting the proper processes in place to ease the heartache and aid the recovery of my machine. With this at the forefront of my mind I’d like to ask the following question:
When my machine is fully rebuilt (it’s a 500GB hard drive)
(1) Should I separate the O/S and programs from my data. i.e. is it good practice to have the O/S and programs on the C: drive and data on the D: drive (same drive partitioned)
(2) I’d like to have the following process in place
Backup up my machine to one of my externals and then backup this external to another external. Therefore I’d have 3 copies of data at any given time. In an ideal world it would be great if the backup process would run in the background and when a file is changed then this would be reflected across my external hard drives. I believe you may have to have a RAID configuration for this. In the event of not having this I could live with backing the machine up say once a week (there’s never that much data that would change during this time) and in the event of a failure I’d only lose a weeks’ data.
(3) there will also be some files (itunes) on one of my externals that wouldn’t be on my laptop due to it’s size. I’d like to ensure that this is copied to external no 2 to ensure piece of mind in the event of failure of external no 1
(4) Ideally if I made a large change to my machines hard drive say add 500 photos then I’d like to commence the backup on this day to ensure I have a copy of those precious moments on my externals.
What is the best methodology to complete this?
What would the recommended software be to do this?
It would be best if the one piece of software covered all scenarios but maybe that is not possible.
Thanks in advance...