Anyone have any advice on backing up?

[luciusad2004]

Hey all. Not sure if this is in the right place for this... if not, let me know.
I recently picked up a Terabyte external hdd.
I was wondering if anyone had any advice on backing up.

I've been kind of using it in the same way that i've used my flashdrives in the past. I just manually copied all of my important files to it. I kind of like doing things manually so i've always been weary of using automated programs for backing things up, but i'm wondering how efficient it really is to try to manually keep track of file changes and such and remember to back them up.

I've considered organizing all of my important folders in to one main folder (my documents, home folder, etc...) that way i could just drag that on to the external and let it do it's thing. But then it spends forever rewriting all of the files that haven't been changed, seems like a waste of time to me.

I just thought i would ask around and see what you guys usually do as far as backing up to an external.

I was also wondering if it's possible to make an image of my hard drive and store that on the external along with all of my files. The drive in my laptop is something pathetic like 80GBs so space really isn't an issue.

[x88x]

For live imaging (ie, automatic, scheduled, full-drive backups), if you're running Windows, I hear good things about Macrium Reflect. Personally, I use FarStone TotalRecovery.

If you just want to make a one-time image, ala Norton Ghost, CloneZilla is by far the best, most versatile, tool I've found. It's not as easy to use as others, but once you get over the small initial learning curve, it's very fast and flexible.

[luciusad2004]

Are the images just a file that i could place in a folder on my external or do they need their own partition/drive? Clonezilla looks kinda nice, I was just thinking of making an image of my disk as is, in working condition, in case anything bad ever happened. I'd probably have enough room on my external to back up a fresh install on my desktop as well. I probably wouldn't be looking to make automated backups.

I'm mostly looking to user the drive as storage for my personal files and such because i find myself switching computers/operating systems a lot.

[x88x]

Yeah, each image is usually just one file unless you specify otherwise or are storing them on a FAT32 formatted drive (2GB file size limit). Automated backups get a bit more complicated, but if you're just doing 1-shot backups, it should just be one file.

[Fuganater]

Acronis and Nero Back It Up works well too.

[AmEv]

Ubuntu and GPartEd make very nice hard drive cloning and back-ups.

Just don't forget to mark HDD as bootable when restoring