What backup program should I use?

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freeware disk imaging and DVD-R's baby...

If you want to back up your whole disk, and have equal room to spare, try

Norton Ghost

I don't use it, because I don't mind Reinstallation of almost everything.
But I've heard, it's good!!!

Well,
C-yeh

Another advocate of Norton's Ghost. Saved my bacon more times than I care to remember - requires a second hard drive ( cheap these days ) but just copy to my Pioneer DVD-RW toaster despite fiddling with the parametres.
This can be done easily with other burning software though so; 1 backup on the 2nd HDD and a a 2nd on a RW-DVD -

Love your site Leo! Okay, I downloaded back up files with Genie. Well recently I lost 2 files on my computer. Now with my back up CDs how do I get them back. Very sorry if this is a really dumb question! Thanks for your precious time. Patrick

I'm not at all familiar with Genie. You might need to contact the vendor's site for support. I would expect the instructions to be part of the basic documentation, though.

how can I back up my media?

You should use an automatic online backup tool like Data Deposit Box... It's not terribly expensive and you can back up as many PCs or servers as you like. Once you set it up, there is nothing to do.

Dear Leo:

How can I be sure that my backup program did a full back as instructed? thanks.

EB

Typically there's a way to examine what files are included in a backup. Another recommended approach is to pick a file at random, and try to restore it.

I backup to an external hard drive every night using a batch file I wrote myself and WinRAR (rar.exe command line program) and GPG (to sign the backups). I keep the past 3 months backups so I can restore any file within that period which is perfect for what I want.

I have tried many other tools however I prefer to backup to a industry standard format and a RAR archive is perfect for this. For a few hundred bucks on the external drive and a few hours writing the batch file it has been a great backup solution for the past few years for me.

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