Back up your photos!!!
 

A lession learned the hard way, I had my hard crash the other day and lost a couple thousand photos:( I'm working on getting a recovery program and hope to salvage some. I have 2 external hard drives, but have been lazy and havent backed up for about 6 months. The hardest loss was all the photos of my grand kids, moments you can never recapture, sucks.

That Sucks! Sorry to hear that.

I have been searching for an automatic sync program that will let me choose which files to sync. I have 1TB hard drive and a 1TB external drive. I want my system to automatically sync them every night at a scheduled time of my choosing. I'm running Windows 7 and it has a back up and restore feature that appeared to do this, but so far it has not. Perhaps I configured it wrong or just misunderstood what the program does?

Do any of you know of a program that will do what I'm wanting? I searched online and found one, but haven't tried it yet. Here's a link to the one I found:

http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbse.html


If you guys know of something better please let me know.

have you tried control panel > system and security > back up your computer?

After having a couple of name brand external drives fail, I had been backing up twice (two external drives) in case one of the externals failed. I've found that it's really a matter of "when" they will fail, not so much "if" they will fail. Somewhere along the line I found Mozy.com and it's a Godsend!! It's an online backup solution that costs about $60 a year. At first I almost dumped it because it took forever to backup my 1 terabyte drive online. I want to say that it took about a month and I'm sure my ISP wasn't too pleased with the bandwidth I was using. However, since then it has been an absolute pleasure. It backs up automatically whenever the computer is idle, so I usually have a message saying that it just completed a backup when I sit down at the computer. I have no backups scheduled, but I'm sure you can do that too. I love the fact that I'll never lose more than a couple of hours worth of work/data. I think there are some other online backup solutions too, but this is the only one I've used.

Also, on your old broken hard drive, they have services that can recover them. I have gone through that experience and they usually will give you an estimate after they look at how badly damaged the drive is. My estimate was for $1,000 because mine was pretty jacked, so I didn't do it, but I was comforted by the fact that they were confident they could get most of the data off if it was something more important to me.

I too have learned this lesson the hard way. I lost a couple of months of data when a name brand laptop went down. Had been backing up, just got lazy. Now, like Dave, I back up in two places: one at the office and one at home. I do this each time I boot up at either place.

Syncback will do exactly what you want. it's a great program.

Well good news, I was able to recover about 90% of my photos with this program. DIY DataRecovery.nl. The best $49.00 I ever spent.

I need to find a program to back it up to. Who do you rec?

For online backups I use CrashPlan. They recently changed their pricing, but when I signed up I got a the "Family Plan" which cover 3 computers, unlimited storage, etc, etc. for $60/year (with a 3 yr plan.)

Even with an online solution you have to plan ahead because it takes a good two months (or longer when running part-time.. unless you're Williams and have your computer running 24/7/365) to back up 700+ GB, so it's best to make a local backup just in case.. CrashPlan also provides (for FREE) the ability designate another computer to backup your files to. This can be a family/friend computer in another house, state, country... Your data is encrypted, so you don't have to worry about wandering eyes. More here: http://b5.crashplan.com/consumer/compare.html Regardless of your preferred backup method it's always a good idea to backup your data OFF-site in case of fire, earthquake, etc..

If you have an anti virus program like AVIRA then it comes with a built-in backup/scheduler. This is my preferred method for local backups.

Or... Windows comes with it's own utilities. I have no personal experience with either of the following, but found them after doing a quick google search.

Windows 7
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...d-restore.aspx

Windows XP
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u..._03july14.mspx