Laptop backup strategy ?

[NGRhodes]

I am soon to put a 40gb hdd in my laptop (currently a 20gb with 8g free).
I am wondering what the best strategy for backing up would be, my primary concern is documents, which will be on their own partition away from Windows and installed programs.
Ideally once a day backups but I could live with once a week backups.
My personal preference is for a solution that uses VSS.

My laptop is not always connected to my network, so is it worth backing my data to a a different partition on the drive ?

What the purchase of a usb memory stick as backup media ?

My current preference will be to utilise my existing HDD as an external USB drive as the backup media which I can plug in once a day.

[Mrkvonic]

Hello,

I would suggest: secondary partition for backup, with or without potential encryption.

If you want to use encryption (TrueCrypt containers for example), then I also suggest you backup your data in unecrypted form to simple DVDs and such in case the laptop gets stolen or damaged.

Essentially, with laptops, the loss of data is increased significantly, so I would suggest you use encryption and multiple offline backups to DVD, as painful as that may be.

Furthermore, I'd recommend bios password, boot password, account passwords for all users - and if you're running Linux, a GRUB password too.

Cheers,
Mrk

[NGRhodes]

Originally Posted by Mrkvonic

Hello,

I would suggest: secondary partition for backup, with or without potential encryption.

If you want to use encryption (TrueCrypt containers for example), then I also suggest you backup your data in unecrypted form to simple DVDs and such in case the laptop gets stolen or damaged.

Essentially, with laptops, the loss of data is increased significantly, so I would suggest you use encryption and multiple offline backups to DVD, as painful as that may be.

Furthermore, I'd recommend bios password, boot password, account passwords for all users - and if you're running Linux, a GRUB password too.

Cheers,
Mrk

I already have a 2nd hdd dedicated to storage/backups on my PC, which will also be a store for laptops backups (probably once a week).

Funny you should mention encryption, I already plan on using truecrypt , one thing I need to look at, is to see how well it works with multiple logins.

I am considering putting Debian (testing) on - as all my apps on my personal machine is open source anyhow (pidgin/thunderbird/firefox/open office etc).

[AKAJohnDoe]

My overall backup strategy is here. I find that backing up a laptop/notebook to an external drive (USB in my case) makes the most sense for a number of reasons.

[Huupi]

Originally Posted by AKAJohnDoe

My overall backup strategy is here. I find that backing up a laptop/notebook to an external drive (USB in my case) makes the most sense for a number of reasons.

It never crossed my mind to do it otherwise.
External USB is the way to go !

[NGRhodes]

Originally Posted by AKAJohnDoe

My overall backup strategy is here. I find that backing up a laptop/notebook to an external drive (USB in my case) makes the most sense for a number of reasons.

Thanks, that will provide a good basis for me.

I plan on putting my data backups on DVD from time to time, I think I would prefer these to be as the actual files, rather than a copy of a backup image, is it easy to extract the file out of an image (eg a virtual drive) ?

[AKAJohnDoe]

I do a manual backup (drag and drop, but it could easily be a .bat/.cmd file) of my user data and also a full backup of the entire system.

Vista is better than XP in this regard, as it correctly places user data, unlike XP, which tends to locate user data under \Program Files\ and elsewhere. With Vista, all I have to backup is the data contained under the %USERPROFILE% directory tree.