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Hardware Software

Backup fun

Back in July I set out to get a good backup solution for my laptop (and my Mac). I then found a 300 GB Hard Drive for $99 (after rebates) [btw: the $99 offer is back again as of this posting], and a $60 case for that drive. My new laptop came with some IBM branded backup software, which royally stunk. Slow, no incremental updates, just not up to par. The only big advantage was that it’s integrated with IBM’s Restoration software, which has an emergency partition, making recovery super easy.

Last week I ordered Acronis True Image (8.0 because I heard 9.0 is still a little rough, and doesn’t have anything I really need). So far this product is a real gem. Easy to install and use. I can do a complete HD backup in 30 minutes, meaning incremental updates (yes it supports them) will be much quicker than that. Lets you put them in a secure partition on any drive you want. It has compression to save space, and you can mount your image should you need to retrieve one or two files from the backup. Appears just like another hard drive. One of my favorite features is that I can still work while it’s backing up my hard drive. I’ve only had it a few days, but so far I think the product is a real gem. This will be great if I get to update my hard drive to an 80 or 100 GB Hitachi 7k100 as you can just mirror your data over with the migration functionality. No reinstalling.

So overall my backup solution is rather cheap (relatively speaking), but works extremely well. I don’t think there’s an excuse these days to not back up. Disk is pretty cheap, and so is decent backup software.

While I’m on the topic of Hard Drives, I’m considering DiskKeeper after hearing so many good things about it. Looks like the Home edition would be enough for my needs. Perhaps I should checkout the demo. I tried it once, but that was quite a while ago.

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