The easiest and safest way to do this would be to copy your data over to an external drive, and then rent a safety deposit box for 20 bucks a year, and put it in there in a plastic bag with a bag of desiccant. Or you could subscribe to an online account with unlimited data like Carbonate offers, and upload it all there.
If you are concerned about security I would zip up the sensitive files with Winzip, and encrypt AES 256bit. If you really concerned you could do this twice so the individual files can not be seen. If you feel it necessary to back up you OS partition off site, then use something like Acronis and image it but I would not do this for data.
Or if the data is very important to you then do both. The whole idea is to keep things simple and not rely on any complicated or proprietary software because when you need to get it back, fancy proprietary software will let you down! Good luck.
At 11:22 AM 9/20/2011, you wrote:
Soooo.yes I know I'm going to sound like an idiot, but let's just say I have my own idiosyncratic ways of doing things and I get set in them, but I am trying to make a change and be better about some of this stuff (it's slow going, but at least it's going!). To that point, I haven't really backed up my stuff, and I have 5 laptops with data on them, and 1 home PC (well two if I count the really old P3 from 2000 that still has stuff I need). Figuring I should really get on this before things get worse (I thought my main PC had died the other day, and the drives are configured in RAID 0 and I realize reconstructing that would've been a major pain, right Tim? ;P) and get this stuff backed up! So what's the easiest way to do this? I guess I could use a cloud service and let it run in the background, but I've got TBs of stuff, and there's that Seattle guy who got shut down by Comcast b/c he exceeded his quota by uploading stuff to the cloud http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/seattle-comcast/, and I don't want to run afoul of Time Warner b/c they're the only fast internet game in my town. Which leaves me with local backup options. I figure I can get like a 2-3TB drive and use my BlackX external USB (tho eSATA would be preferable but most of my laptops don't have it-in fact none do *sigh*) and just backup over USB (at least the newer laptops with more data on them are USB 2.0!) and that's my best option. The only question at this point is what software (if any) I should use? I don't mind paying for something if it's that much better and will make my life easier-ease of use is worth it for me now, so good features are welcome! Or should I just copy C:\ in Explorer over to the new drive and backup each computer separately that way? Thoughts, advice, comments, opinions all welcome guys! BINO
