Standalone Back-up

jescab

What is everyones thoughts on the best method to back-up a stand alone work station? OS's = XP

sprkymrk

What do you want to back up? Data or config or both? Manually via DVD burner or scripted/scheduled with external drive are options.

jescab

Lets say:

Data then
back-up both.

BubbaJ

There are a lot of "one-touch" backup USB devices on the market. I think all the hard drive manufacturers have them.

sprkymrk

You can use either the MS backup utility, a batch file or script with xcopy or robocopy, or just manually drag and drop.

The best option is an external drive that can save several backups before overwriting, but remember in the event of a fire, lightening strike or whatnot you could lose both the stand alone workstation drive and the external drive in one fell swoop.

For better redundancy, I would think about getting an internal removable drive cage/bay and a few spare hard drives. This way you can run whatever backups you want and swap out the backup drive either daily or weekly and rotate between 3-5 drives if necessary, storing them off site. You could get by with some smaller drives for the swappable backup, like 20GB or so. Buying a few of these wouldn't be too expensive. It all depends on how critical the data is and how much you are willing to spend.

If this is just your home computer, burning a CD or copy to a thumb drive depending on how much data to back up.

RussS

It all depends on how much data you want to backup. I use a tidy little script for backing up to a thumb drive or NAS device.