I was reading Chris Pirillo‘s latest blog entry about backup and file management this morning and it inspired me to share what I do to back up and mirror the important stuff. (Watch the show featuring Chris’ dad if you haven’t already.)
Backing up is important incase something happens to your computer or laptop. If you haven’t backed up and your laptop breaks, then you might lose all your work. While you can use this website to see product reviews that will help you pick the best laptop, nothing can replace your lost work. That is why individuals often use something Windows Backup, which is a built-in application. Using this feature, users can easily back up important data on the hard drive of their computer. However, some Windows users have encountered the error 0x800700E1 when backing up important files or data to an external drive. Note that this error code does not allow users to create a backup and requires further troubleshooting to bypass error 0x800700e1.
Anyway, let us come back to the original topic without further ado. The below-mentioned things can help you backup and mirror your important work. They can ensure that your data is never lost.
The hardware: Two cheap and identical 500 GB external USB hard drives from TrekStor. € 99,- / USD 135,- each.
The software: MirrorFolder for Windows XP from TechSoft. € 28,5 / USD 39,- per computer license. (If anyone knows of a better software solution for mirroring and for other platforms, please leave a comment!)
Important files and folders on my workstation(s) and laptop are set to be automatically mirrored on both of the external disks. Projects, music, settings, etc are all mirrored on both of the disks for redundancy. So in event that one hard drive breaks down, it doesn’t automatically translate to an entire loss of backup data.
In a similar vein, when keeping more than one backup pair of hard drives (say one pair for your work files and the other for your personal files), it can get confusing to know which external disk contains what information. Here, two-part asset tags can prove extremely helpful in discerning one pair from the other. Those interested in learning about tagging devices and equipment can go to this site for an in-depth understanding.
Another clear advantage of keeping redundant external drive backup is that I can take one of the disks with me on the move without worrying too much about data loss.
Works for me ™.
What do you do? Please share your experiences and leave a comment!