Thread: Repartitioning your hard drive

I've also been doing that for a long time. The trouble has been running out of space for backups and more annoyingly duplicating things across PC's that get out of synch. I just bit the bullet and bought a NAS (Network Attached Storage). Basically this is a standalone disk that connects directly to the home network. You can see the drive from any PC connected to the LAN so there is only one copy of data on the network and only one place to backup.

In an attempt to future proof a little, I went for one that will cooperate with Home Media Players, PS3's, xboxes etc, even though I don't have a digital entertainment setup yet.

Making a major effort at the moment to sift through lots of old backups and offlined to CD things and cull the duplicates of various files. It used to be I had a cupboard full of backup diskettes, then a cupboard full of CDs followed by DVD's. Now I've got a 2 TB space online and I'll probably end up with a cupboard full of usb desktop hard drives to backup.

I don't actually trust RAID that much, I prefer hard copies in different places for backup. For the moment I'm using the main PC data partition as the backup location.

Well, backing up docs is a whole other ballgame as the Yanks might say.

I also went NAS and tried but failed to automate it for backing up my partner's docs. The damn thing still had to be manually mounted.

However doing a mirror of C: is one of my must-do practices and I use Acronis True Image for that. Haven't yet attempted it on the missus' laptop since it makes a hidden partition if you want the local backup and it may choke on Win7. I notice they've also changed the package title in the latest edition so maybe that's why.

Yes, a NAS is the ideal solution. Don't bother storing anything on your local drives at all, and then back the NAS up to a USB attached drive. Simple and effective.

I ran an NAS on a network with three clients when they first came out. Found it was more hassle than it was worth, so bought a 3yo Dell Laptop and dropped it onto the network as a server and mapped its shared folders on each of the PCs. Set up with wake on LAN and hybernates after 5 mins of inactivity, has a good set of batts so effectively UPS. Burns less power than the NAS did, doesn't cook the drive, and many times more reliable, plus takes USB drives for backup etc.Cost $200 plus $150 laterfor a Sata drive cage and 500MB 2.5 in Sata drive.

Not surprisingly technology keeps changing. Some of the original NAS drives looked clunky. I've bought a QNAP TS-119 which is basically a standalone full function linux server, for the same ball park figure. In operational mode it's rated at 13 Watts, 5W in sleep mode. It supports the WD green drives, so that would probably drop the operational rating somewhat to.

I had some thoughts of just getting the media player as that looks like it could do the NAS job as well. However by the time I get into that digital arena I'll probably be able to justify it as a separate component anyway.

I do on-site backups but obviously if the place burns down they go too. I sub to Carbonite, a web backup service that runs in the background. Not free by any means but after taking out a year's sub I got a discount on a 2nd machine so my partner got the benefit of that. So many ordinary users have no idea about backups and something that runs without intervention is a plus.

Tech support from Carbonite is very good.