Best free backup solution in your opinion

Discussion in 'Software' started by LeoBloom., Jun 25, 2012.

  1. LeoBloom.

    LeoBloom. Private E-2

    Lots of photos and sensitive scans such as tax information.

    Currently everything is on one computer.

    Thoughts?

    Thanks for your input
     
  2. usafveteran

    usafveteran MajorGeek

    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?
     
  3. plodr

    plodr Major Geek Super Extraordinaire

    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)
     
  4. LeoBloom.

    LeoBloom. Private E-2

    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.
     
  5. John_geek

    John_geek Private E-2

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

    mjnc MajorGeek


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