Hardrive Backup
 

For example, say I have 1 TB Hard drive and I use it to store pictures and important files and hypothetically acts as my main partition as well.

It's not wise to not have a backup; hence, I buy another 1 TB hard drive to replicate and back up all the files from my main partition.

My question is, eventually you'll run out of space from the main partition, do you keep buying multiple hard drives to back up stuff? I notice I run out of space easily because of making backups of the same files.

Use an incremental backup system - it basically backs up what has changed. Doesn't back up everything every time, just what has changed since the first backup. It is much more space efficient.

^This. Stuff like Acronis or Ghost will do. There are also free apps (which I haven't tried) that should do the job just as well.

If you're really lazy, external drives like WD's MyBook will do that automatically.


Otherwise, what I would probably do if money wasn't a huge issue is the following:

-Get a small SSD (64-128GB) to act as your main partition and programs only. You'll thank both me and yourself for doing so. Of course this will require a reinstall of your OS (but no data lost since you're installing onto a new drive.

-Just keep the 2 drives as backup drives/file storage. If your motherboard supports it, you can use JBOD which clumps your 2 drives into one logical drive. Lastly, you can just manually copy files to either drive if you don't want to do JBOD. That said, JBOD will require you to reformat both drives, so that might be out of the question lol

If your motherboard supports it as well - you could run RAID 1 on that storage drive - get an identical 1TB drive - and basically your MB would simultaneously write to both drives - so if one fails - your other will still have the exact same data. It shouldn't require a reformat.

If you're able to pare your OS drive down to the essentials (program files, windows files, etc) and transfer everything else to a secondary drive - there are ways of installing an SSD without doing a reinstall. You can create a backup image and then restoring that backup onto an SSD.

x3 on going the SSD route, but I'd opt for a 240-ish SSD instead of anything smaller. They are reasonably cheap now (~$150 - $160 when on sale), and the performance from a 240GB SSD is almost always quite a bit faster than the 120 or 60GB drives.

here is my backup system i have in place.
OS/programs are on an ssd
my pictures/songs/videos and other important data are on 2x 3tb drives that are mirrored using windows raid.

Then I have another external hard drive that i use to back that up on a bi-weekly bases.
I don't really need to keep any versioning on my files so space is not really a concern as long as my 3tb are not full.

Just to note. RAID isn't a backup solution. RAID is about having data that's always accessible.

All my desktop files are incrementally backed up to my server which is then mirrored to another drive. Once a month I do another backup to an external 2.5" drive so I more or less have 4 copies of anything important.

That's a whole lot of love for your porn :-)

That's what's on the 5th drive... lol

No mirror for the 5th drive? You're really living life on the edge!
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