Looking for backup software...

What is the best software to use to backup one hard drive to another on a daily or weekly basis?

These would be dual hard drives in the same laptop.

Thanks!

 

I personally recommend Norton Ghost. I've never had it fail on me, and the restore portion of the program (as in restore from an image) works flawlessly if you disable SATA before doing a restore operation. For some reason Ghost isn't aware of my SATA HDD, or I run the HDD in legacy (IDE) mode for recovery operations.

It does incremental backups as well, which means if you make a backup now (say 15GB), add 5GB in files, and do another backup (20GB total), it will only create 1x 15GB file and 1x 5GB file. It will not take up 15+20. Both of these recovery points can be used as described below, so you can see the differences between the two points very easily. VERY useful when trying to identify what changed or what caused a problem.

You can even mount the recovery images to a letter drive and explore them, just in case you only want one or two files. Password protection and encryption are options for the backup operations as well.

 

How often are your backing up?

Can NG be setup to run automatically?

Any idea about how long it would take to backup around 40-50GB?

Thanks!

 

E (Data) => once per day
C (XP) => once per week

Yes, it can be configured to automatically run, or you can tell it when to backup manually. Or both: it will backup regularly and you can tell it manually when to do another backup for the same "series" of images.

Well, the first time takes a while (since it is a lot of data), but after that I think usually about 30-45 mins. Most of that time is spent on NGs checking for file differences. My files don't change that often but I want to make sure I get regular backups.

FYI, NG doens't take up a lot of CPU either, so my system will not slow down when backing up data. Usually I find myself checking to see if the backup was actually made, since I never notice a performance hit.

 

Thanks for all the info.

That was a question I failed to ask... yet important. Generally the only time I'm not on my laptop is when I'm asleep and I like to cut it off and let it rest.

 

You should be fine. Also, IF it does take too much of the CPU (depending on how old the machine is), NG has the ability to scale down how much it uses through a slider in the options pages.

Also, I forgot to mention this. If the backup storage location isn't available, the backup software will just skip that instance of backup for the day.

Example: even though I backup E (Data) every day, I usually do not get to create a backup Friday though Sunday as I'm always running around with my laptop then. NG sees the backup location is missing, and attempts a backup the next day instead.