Best Drive Backup Software

I've got roughly about 500GB of Videos and Music now and my collection keeps expanding at almost an exponential rate. As such, I'm becoming increasingly concerned with Drive Integrity and storing all of my files in one location.

Eventually I will buy a RAID External hard drive setup. Until then, I'm sticking with a 750GB iomega external drive, 320GB WD Passport External drive and a 250 GB WD Mybook External drive.

My question is what is the best backup program that will backup all of my files from my 750GB (My Movies/Videos Drive) and be able to compress it down to a more managable size that I could possibly fit onto my 320GB or 250GB.

 

Most of videos files and music are compressed nowadays, you won't gain much space using compression.

 

Yeah, they won't compress much at all (in fact they'll probably actually get bigger). The best program is to whip out the Visa (or Discover Card) and buy more HDs.

 

Macrium Reflect might work?

 

I've had great success compressing my storage partition with a linux program called PartImage. Most of my files aren't MP3's so I'm not sure how successful it would really be for that. (This is a program that creates an image of an entire partition, not file by file.)

I don't think anything is going to give you the compression level you want though.

 

Have you thought of Windows Home Server? It's actually pretty slick. You can build your own using a relatively old PC (1.2Ghz), or buy the HP version.

A couple of things it will do in your situation:
1. provide an easy unattended backup solution of your computer.
2. provide a central storage location for your media.
3. duplicate your media on two drives to protect against drive failure.

By the time you get all the drives you'll use for backup, and the time involved to do the backups, AND the time required to maintain the backups (what did I backup? What do I need to backup? Did I remember, etc) I think this would be a great solution. The HP starts @ $500, but you can get the software only for something around $150.

 

You want syncing software of some kind. There are several to choose from, but I use SmartSync:

http://www.smartsync.com/

It essentially compares a folder structure in two locations (your working copy and a backup on an exteral drive, NAS, or server) and syncs them...either manually, on a schedule, or constantly. So after the initial sync, it only needs to copy new or changed files. It's perfect for large MP3 or photo collections where you have a huge anount of data but only afew things change.

It also stores your files in native format, not in some proprietary database. So you can access anything easily. Give it (or another sync software like it) a look. Sounds like what you need.