Okay, I know, asking on a car website about a computer problem is dumb, but here's my thinking:

"I'm lazy"

I'm looking for help on how to back up my computer in the fastest and laziest manner possible and I know, if anyone's going to find an easy way to do anything, it's the coop crew! Where as computer geeks can over complicate things and get very angry when you say that their idea is not suitable for you.

So here's my problem:
Just built a new PC, it's got a 240GB drive, a 200GB drive and a 500GB Drive, now the 500GB Drive is just for backing up the other two, but I'm in multiple minds as to how to do it.

My options are:
1. Backup all the folders manually by dragging them into the other drive, slow, boring, time consuming and i'll always miss a really important file. Also, if i need to restore from backup I'll need to reinstall everything first.

2. Copy an image of the two hard drives to the backup drive once a month. Will take a while, will catch everything and will be easy to restore from backup.

3. use some sort of program like windows backup to back up critical data for me. can remind me to do it so often, will backup any folders I ask it to, have never used it before.

4. some sort of program like norton ghost that can make a copy of the hard disks on the fly, or ideally, whenever I fall asleep with the computer switched on! There must be some program out there that can do it!


So, I have very little experience with backing up things, if any of you guys have any ideas, let me know please.

Regards
Jackal/Carl/Solouko

xcopy *.* e: /e /d

Assuming your 500Gb drive is E:

I like it, should I partition the 500GB (F:) Drive so that it has two partitions the same size as the 240GB (C: windows) Drive and the 200GB (D:) drive and then set up a .BAT file to copy both to what would be the F: and G: partitions?

I could run that once a month then, even schedule it to run automatically?
something like this:

xcopy C: F: /e /d /v
xcopy D: G: /e /d /v

With the /v modifier just so that I know it's been copied correctly.

If the C: drive was copied, onto it's own partition, would the new partition on the 500GB Drive be bootable?

Also, thanks for the rapid response.

I haven't messed around with this sort of thing for a while, but it always used to be the case that a drive wasn't bootable unless its boot sector was written, which xcopy won't do.

You'd also need to do a regular export of your registry - it may be possible to do that from a BAT file, if not you can do it from RegEdit.

Could you make it raid 5 with the 3 hard drives then you are protected if 1 drive fails. This doesn't protect you if 2 fail at the same time but that is very unlikely.

Crashplan. It will do simple disk to disk backups (either the whole disk or selected folders), backup to other PSs, accept backups for other pc and if you purchase storage backup to the cloud.

It has email reminder which will warn you when you havent backup'd in a while.

I think it would be as well to move the 500gb disk to an external case or buy a additional external drive as having the disk in the computer wont protect against theft/fire etc and possibly virus infection.

No, forgot to tell you that the 240GB and 200GB drives are already both RAID 0 drives, comprising of 2x120GB SSDDs and 2x100GB SSDDs, hence the need for backup, high performance, high instability. also, kinda want to do it on the cheap, without having to reinstall everything.

If i used the disk cloning tool available on ubuntu (which my other PC and laptop run) to clone the boot disk to the 500GB WD drive first... would xcopy then be able to update all the files accordingly?

drive image try that

Okay, the xcopy idea doesn't want to work, i can copy the entire disk, but then xcopy cant copy onto that drive (partition) because it's an exact copy and I dont think it has permissions.

I'll look into Drive image and crashplan, but do they have the option to only copy files that have changed or modified? I don't like to idea of having to backup 500GB every time, just the changed files would be best.

Thanks for you help so far.

Crashplan, yes. Once its completed it first backup it will only copy new or modified files.

http://disk-imaging-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

have a look