[freedomlover]

A question for you techies - can you suggest a reliable automated backup program which will help me with my home system in which most of my data is saved straight to an external drive (not the C drive), which I would like to backup regularly to another external drive? I seem to run into trouble finding software that will back up from one external drive to another external drive (but honestly I havent spend a lot of time looking). Windows 7 all around.

To complicate things, if possible I would like to backup to/from drives on an offsite Pogoplug Series 4. My brother and I each have one so we can save data at the other’s house in case of fire.

I dont mind spending a little $ if needed.

thanks
FL

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

software that will back up from one external drive to another external drive

Cobian Backup.

It's free and works great for me. Use Windows Task Scheduler to call it for regular weekly or daily backups. I don't even think about backing up all the Quicken data or My Documents off to an external drive anymore. With Cobian and Windows Task Scheduler, it's done and works like a champ.

[rarestia]

Look for Norton Ghost. I think the full-featured product is relatively cheap, but the text-based, scriptable program still exists and is usually freeware.

That'll do the disk-to-disk mirroring OR you could always invest in mirroring hardware that will create an array for you. I used a SATA RAID enclosure like this one, ran my backups, removed one disk to store, and installed a third disk in that disk's place. The array hardware will rebuild the mirror, and you'll be back to redundant storage.

[entropy12]

I have dealt with backup issues for 35+ years. You already are aware of storing backup medium offsite. The other backup issue which hardly any one talks about is how do you know your data is already partially corrupted by the hardware? Backing up corrupt data will obviously create corrupt backup.

So if the data is critical and very difficult to reproduce, you should have a procedure to periodically examine the entire data file for integrity. If that is not possible then you should keep older backup media around instead of re-using them very frequently.

As for selecting a automated backup software, I have no recommendation since I no longer manage computer systems since I retired dozen years ago. For my personal use, I use manual backup since the number of files changing frequently are few.