Best free backup solution in your opinion

[LeoBloom.]

Lots of photos and sensitive scans such as tax information.

Currently everything is on one computer.

Thoughts?

Thanks for your input

[usafveteran]

Burning to disc (CD or DVD) is your best bet; I'm assuming you want to keep the photos for a very long time. An external hard drive is also good. For tax info, you might also use a flash drive, I guess; this somewhat depends on how long you need to keep that tax data. The longer the time span, the more I'd lean toward CD or DVD.

Edit: Perhaps I got off track here. Are you mainly asking about software?

[plodr]

I NEVER keep sensitive things on my computers. I make 2 backups of things I need. I burn DVDs and put on two different external hard drives or USB sticks.

When I take pictures, the first thing I do is burn the unaltered photos to a data CD. I have every decent picture I ever took archived on CDs. When the hd dies, I still have the pictures. (Murphey's Law: the more important the data on the hd, the greater the probability that the hd will die)

[LeoBloom.]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I am not a fan of DVDs or CDs - I'd much rather prefer a cloud solution or backup across multiple hard drives.

I have 20 GB of space on dropbox from referrals but I have two issues with using dropbox for this purpose: I don't want all my photos synced to all my computers and I am not sure about keeping personal sensitive information on something like dropbox.

For the first issue, setting up their selective sync feature sucks. Everytime you add a new folder to dropbox, you need to physically go to every computer to disable syncing of that folder. Everytime! I think I will try to avoid this by creating a "No Sync" folder, setting it up on every computer once, and then managing all my folders with photos in that one main folder.

As for issue #2, I have heard of using TrueCrypt and syncing that within the dropbox folder. Any one with experience with this or something similar?

What I do like about dropbox though, is that if something is deleted by a virus or something of that sort, the dropbox servers will maintain a copy of everything for 30 days past deletion.

The other alternative is syncing across multiple hard drives. I'd like to sync to a hard drive that is in another computer in another house. Is such a thing possible?

Thanks again.

[John_geek]

As for me Handy Backup 7 free edition it the best free backup software solution.

[mjnc]

EASEUS Todo Backup Free Edition

Review:
Backup Your PC With Ease For Free Using Easeus Todo Backup

For File Backup:
Karen's Replicator

Cobian Backup