Back up hard drive help needed

[Michelle Brooks Photography]

I hope this is the right forum to post this I have a HP dv6700 Pavilion laptop that is my primary computer for editing and storing my photos. I need to establish a way to back up my images, and was considering an external HD but after doing a search about it on POTN it seems a lot of people say that is the wrong way to go. I am not by any means really techno savvy, tho I know the very basics, and some of the language has me confused. I see some advising a "box" or "case" and a drive? Also some talk about docking stations? I tried contacting Thermaltake USA about their BlacX (a poster recommended it) but the replywas confusing to me (
"This storage devicedon't come with back up software.
You can copy and paste thedata to the SATA HDD in the docking station" that's copied directly from the email) I'm looking to spend as little as I can BUT I want to get something reliable, fast, and easyto operate with my laptop. I don't want to go the El Cheapo route and regret it a year later. Any of you guys have a suggestion? 'Preciate ya!

[adam8080]

Well, since you have a laptop you have to use something external. You can get a normal external hard drive, NAS, home server, or backup to some service online.

If I was to go the cheapest route, I would get an external hard drive and use Second Copy.

The easiest (after setup) would be a NAS or home server that automatically backups up when you are connected to the network.

[Michelle Brooks Photography]

Originally Posted by adam8080

Well, since you have a laptop you have to use something external. You can get a normal external hard drive, NAS, home server, or backup to some service online.

If I was to go the cheapest route, I would get an external hard drive and use Second Copy.

The easiest (after setup) would be a NAS or home server that automatically backups up when you are connected to the network.

Ok, I have 2 questions; what is NAS, and if I have an external drive why would I need second Copy (I went to the website for a cursory glance)? Not being a smart aleck (!) I really need to know. Thanks!

[adam8080]

Originally Posted by chellyroo

Ok, I have 2 questions; what is NAS, and if I have an external drive why would I need second Copy (I went to the website for a cursory glance)? Not being a smart aleck (!) I really need to know. Thanks!

I forgot about this thread. Anyways, NAS is network attached storage. Basicly is is an external hard drive connected to your network (wifi, lan/ ethernet cord) instead of a usb cable.

Second copy is a program that backs up your data for you. For example, I have my computer to copy "My Pictures" folder on my main hard drive to "My Pictures Backup" folder on my backup hard drive every day at 2:00am. It only copies the files that have changed since the last backup, so it is quick. Set it, and forget it! You can download the program and use it for free for 30 days. After 30 days, you can continue to use it, but cannot make any changes.

If I were in your shoes I would have a NAS (1TB or however) hooked up to a wireless router, Second Copy on my laptop to backup at midnight. You don't have to plug/unplug anything from your laptop, just make sure it is on and connected to wifi so it can backup daily.

[dipps]

This storage devicedon't come with back up software.

doesn't matter. you can buy an external drive (near any flavor) and use synctoy or syncback (both are free) as your backup software.

cheap iomega 500gb ext hard drive (desktop)
http://www.amazon.com/Iomega-Prestig...6847354&sr=8-2

or go portable
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAg...847468&sr=8-16

syncback
http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/

synctoy
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/d...displaylang=en

a desktop hard drive will likely require only one USB connection and have a power cord to plug into a 120v outlet. a portable will likely power thru it's USB connection, and will require two USB slots to do so.

you mention "not tech saavy".... if you want to do things correctly, you'll need to read up a bit before setting up your "backup" system and understand what you are doing, or you defeat the purpose of setting up a backup system in the first place.

http://lifehacker.com/147855/geek-to...our-hard-drive

http://www.ehow.com/how_2262273_use-...ckup-data.html

[Michelle Brooks Photography]

Originally Posted by dipps

doesn't matter. you can buy an external drive (near any flavor) and use synctoy or syncback (both are free) as your backup software.

cheap iomega 500gb ext hard drive (desktop)
http://www.amazon.com/Iomega-Prestig...6847354&sr=8-2

or go portable
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAg...847468&sr=8-16

syncback
http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/

synctoy
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/d...displaylang=en

a desktop hard drive will likely require only one USB connection and have a power cord to plug into a 120v outlet. a portable will likely power thru it's USB connection, and will require two USB slots to do so.

you mention "not tech saavy".... if you want to do things correctly, you'll need to read up a bit before setting up your "backup" system and understand what you are doing, or you defeat the purpose of setting up a backup system in the first place.

http://lifehacker.com/147855/geek-to...our-hard-drive

http://www.ehow.com/how_2262273_use-...ckup-data.html

Seagate is actually one of the externals I was looking at. i appreciate all these links I am going to check them out... I'm a daisy if I do! (love that movie!)

[tim]

On the internet you can find someone to tell you anything's a good or bad idea. I can tell you I can't afford to lose peoples wedding photos, and I back up to external hard drive that I keep offsite.

Get a 1.5TB or so Seagate external hard drive, and use Synctoy to mirror your hard drive. Don't mirror the program files directory, but make sure you get images, lightroom catalog, personal files, etc. Keep the external drive away from your home, and plan for your house to burn down/be robbed.

To keep working files up to date you can use Mozy, which backs up to an online data center once or twice a day automatically. You can't really back up images, they're too big, but documents are no problem.

[Michelle Brooks Photography]

Originally Posted by tim

On the internet you can find someone to tell you anything's a good or bad idea. I can tell you I can't afford to lose peoples wedding photos, and I back up to external hard drive that I keep offsite.

Get a 1.5TB or so Seagate external hard drive, and use Synctoy to mirror your hard drive. Don't mirror the program files directory, but make sure you get images, lightroom catalog, personal files, etc. Keep the external drive away from your home, and plan for your house to burn down/be robbed.

To keep working files up to date you can use Mozy, which backs up to an online data center once or twice a day automatically. You can't really back up images, they're too big, but documents are no problem.

Hey, Tim!
Not about to pretend I understand everything you wrote but I am going to take some time to research and decipher it. I absolutely need to get something in place now before I build a large catalog of work. I tell ya, between trying to learn the camera techniques, the pping, and the data storage, my brain is oatmeal! Besides this external hd issue, I am having a hard time understanding the work flow once I download my images into my computer (into Lightroom); it seems like there are folders everywhere! I bought a book by Nathaniel Coalson on LR, but it's slow going for me.

[Shootfilm]

Im not that hi-tech. I use the canon cf card utility to put all the files straight onto a external HDD(WD my book). Then I import them into LR and copy to my pc hd. I dont touch the files on the external. When an external is full it goes to the bank to sit in the deposit box.

SF

[zerovision]

Do you, by any chance, use lightroom by Adobe? If not, would you consider getting it? This software is used by both pros and beginners. It's not cheap, but it will help you organize your photos and is one of the best at editing.

The main reason I ask about Lightroom is that it is user friendly if you want to put your photos in a specific location such as an external drive. With a laptop, it is always good to mirror your HD so if something happens to your drive, you can perform a simple restore to a new drive and have everything you had before. If you are just interested in keeping your photos safe, which is what I do, then lightroom is the way to go and two external drives.

I'll explain. Your laptop needs open storage on your drive to run fast. Pix take up space, a lot of space. An external drive, portable or other wise, will hold your pix and leave your laptop drive free to run your programs and run them faster. Two external drives are best because one is your main drive and with lightroom you can upload your pix on to your external drive A and at the same time back them up on drive B. Now there are other software programs that allow you to do this, but Lightroom has many other features that allow you to organize, assign keywords, make collections, set up slideshows, edit your pix and a million other things.

If you are serious about your pictures and keeping them safe, this is the way to go. If one drive fails you have a back up. When you upload your pictures, you can assign your main external drive and back up drive at the same time to load the picture right then and there.

Do some research on this forum and the web. The software is about $200 full version and around $99 upgrade. You can get two drives that are portable, Western Digital, Seagate, etc at Best Buy, 320GB drives for about $80 each or up to 1 TB (1,000 GB) drives that would run about $170 if you want portable. Not sure I would recommend 1TB portable unless you take a ton of pictures. You could look into getting a HD for the home that is 1, 1.5 or 2 TB that could be your back up drive, but if you are away from home, you will have to back up when you return instead of on the spot.

I know it sounds like a lot of money, but I have had drives and computers fail and it is more expensive to replace them or try to pay a company to recover your photos.

good luck and keep us posted on your decision.

[tim]

Originally Posted by zerovision

Do you, by any chance, use lightroom by Adobe? If not, would you consider getting it? This software is used by both pros and beginners. It's not cheap, but it will help you organize your photos and is one of the best at editing.

The main reason I ask about Lightroom is that it is user friendly if you want to put your photos in a specific location such as an external drive. With a laptop, it is always good to mirror your HD so if something happens to your drive, you can perform a simple restore to a new drive and have everything you had before. If you are just interested in keeping your photos safe, which is what I do, then lightroom is the way to go and two external drives.

I'll explain. Your laptop needs open storage on your drive to run fast. Pix take up space, a lot of space. An external drive, portable or other wise, will hold your pix and leave your laptop drive free to run your programs and run them faster. Two external drives are best because one is your main drive and with lightroom you can upload your pix on to your external drive A and at the same time back them up on drive B. Now there are other software programs that allow you to do this, but Lightroom has many other features that allow you to organize, assign keywords, make collections, set up slideshows, edit your pix and a million other things.

If you are serious about your pictures and keeping them safe, this is the way to go. If one drive fails you have a back up. When you upload your pictures, you can assign your main external drive and back up drive at the same time to load the picture right then and there.

Do some research on this forum and the web. The software is about $200 full version and around $99 upgrade. You can get two drives that are portable, Western Digital, Seagate, etc at Best Buy, 320GB drives for about $80 each or up to 1 TB (1,000 GB) drives that would run about $170 if you want portable. Not sure I would recommend 1TB portable unless you take a ton of pictures. You could look into getting a HD for the home that is 1, 1.5 or 2 TB that could be your back up drive, but if you are away from home, you will have to back up when you return instead of on the spot.

I know it sounds like a lot of money, but I have had drives and computers fail and it is more expensive to replace them or try to pay a company to recover your photos.

good luck and keep us posted on your decision.

I'm sorry but I disagree with pretty much everything you've said:
- External USB drives are slow, and make the whole computer run slower. Internal or external SATA drives are much faster. For laptops, upgrading the internal drive to a larger model is often the best option. XXClone is a free tool for windows that helps with this.
- If you keep your external drive connected to your machine it's not longer a backup, it's a working drive. If you do that you really need another larger external drive to back up your external working drive and your internal drive.
- Mirroring a drive isn't as simple as copying the files. You need to make it bootable, and it's rare to be able to mirror a drive while it's running. This is resource intensive, and takes time. I suggest using "DriveImage XML" (like Ghost, but free) to make a backup of the hard drive right after windows is installed, and again once the apps are installed. Doing it every three months is probably a good idea too. If you plan to do this and only have one internal drive I wonder if it's possible to partition the disk into OS/Apps and data, otherwise the image will be massive. Images can be backed up with a simple piece of software like Synctoy or Robocopy.
- Lightroom IS cheap, at least compared with Photoshop.

[zerovision]

I understand what you are saying Tim, and I respect your advise, but I have had Windows based computers since 89' and recently switched to Apple. My HP desktop has two internal drives and one external drive. I would love to have a Mac Pro with 4 internal 1TB drives to mirror with 8-core xeon processor to run my set up, but I did not consider that my best option as I wanted something portable so I put my money in a macbook pro and a 24" cinema display when I'm at home.

Another thing I have on my list is the HP MediaSmart server. 4 drives that can be connected via SATA, USB, or RJ45 plenty fast with RAID 0,1, or 5, but again I do not have the funds yet. These are great options, but I did not think that Chellyroo would want to mess with these more complicated options.

I had an HP notebook that was a 17" and only discovered for myself that it had a second internal HP slot. HP did not even advertise this feature anywhere. I found out why, when I ordered a second internal drive and the cradle needed for it, nothing worked. I even tried to have a tech install it. Found out that the cradle did not fit properly and then shortly after that my computers I/O board failed and it was not under warranty. Turned out six months later that my co-workers HP notebook failed for the same reason and it was not under warranty. Heard later that the Nvidia video board was the problem.

Anyway, if Chellyroo wants the SATA speed all she has to do is get a PC card with SATA connections and purchase two SATA external drives. I'm sure her notebook has a PC slot 99% of all notebooks have them.

If she wants to run everything on the internal drive that is fine, I was simply passing on the same set up that Scott Kelby showed at his seminar here in Dallas earlier this year. I have used it for a few months and, all though it may slow my notebook down, it has not bothered me enough to change this method.

[Michelle Brooks Photography]

Originally Posted by zerovision

Do you, by any chance, use lightroom by Adobe? If not, would you consider getting it? This software is used by both pros and beginners. It's not cheap, but it will help you organize your photos and is one of the best at editing.

The main reason I ask about Lightroom is that it is user friendly if you want to put your photos in a specific location such as an external drive. With a laptop, it is always good to mirror your HD so if something happens to your drive, you can perform a simple restore to a new drive and have everything you had before. If you are just interested in keeping your photos safe, which is what I do, then lightroom is the way to go and two external drives.

I'll explain. Your laptop needs open storage on your drive to run fast. Pix take up space, a lot of space. An external drive, portable or other wise, will hold your pix and leave your laptop drive free to run your programs and run them faster. Two external drives are best because one is your main drive and with lightroom you can upload your pix on to your external drive A and at the same time back them up on drive B. Now there are other software programs that allow you to do this, but Lightroom has many other features that allow you to organize, assign keywords, make collections, set up slideshows, edit your pix and a million other things.

If you are serious about your pictures and keeping them safe, this is the way to go. If one drive fails you have a back up. When you upload your pictures, you can assign your main external drive and back up drive at the same time to load the picture right then and there.

Do some research on this forum and the web. The software is about $200 full version and around $99 upgrade. You can get two drives that are portable, Western Digital, Seagate, etc at Best Buy, 320GB drives for about $80 each or up to 1 TB (1,000 GB) drives that would run about $170 if you want portable. Not sure I would recommend 1TB portable unless you take a ton of pictures. You could look into getting a HD for the home that is 1, 1.5 or 2 TB that could be your back up drive, but if you are away from home, you will have to back up when you return instead of on the spot.

I know it sounds like a lot of money, but I have had drives and computers fail and it is more expensive to replace them or try to pay a company to recover your photos.

good luck and keep us posted on your decision.

I do have Lightroom; I've just been using it for about a month and trying to learn it and PS at the same time.

I'm a little confused about you saying that you back up to an external drive to free up your laptop-- the guy I talked to this morning at the computer shop told me that when you do a back up to an external HD you're not erasing the images transferred, you're just copying; to get the images totally off my laptop I would have to manually delete them. Is that what you do? Thank you for going into so much detail.

[Michelle Brooks Photography]

Ok, I took my laptop in to the computer repair guys this morning, and they are running a diagnostic on the main HD to see if there is corruption (b/c of the warning screen I got last night) and they ordered a Seagate One TOuch 1TB for me for $159 for my external drive, and recommended an of site online storage as additional insurance (of course they want me to use theirs, which is $30 month!). Looks like I might also end up replacing the HD on the laptop I'm just grateful it didn't actually crash since I have NO data backed up right now!

[dipps]

Originally Posted by chellyroo

Ok, I took my laptop in to the computer repair guys this morning, and they are running a diagnostic on the main HD to see if there is corruption (b/c of the warning screen I got last night) and they ordered a Seagate One TOuch 1TB for me for $159 for my external drive, and recommended an of site online storage as additional insurance (of course they want me to use theirs, which is $30 month!). Looks like I might also end up replacing the HD on the laptop I'm just grateful it didn't actually crash since I have NO data backed up right now!

$169 for a 1TB ext drive?!? you can get a seagate freeagent desk 750GB for $80.......

http://dealnews.com/Seagate.com-Outl...ng/327925.html

and $30 a month for their online backup service?? you can get carbonite (highly reputable) for $55 a YEAR....... ($55 versus $360....)

http://www.carbonite.com/

more reading on online backup services.....
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2288745,00.asp

i can't help but think these computer repair guys of yours are trying to "soak" a little money out of you.