File Back Up Strategy - Average User. Am I OK?

[garywi]

Hello Everyone, I don't like cloud back up services yet, so I do my own. Can you give me a thumbs up or down and if you would change anything?

In my desk top PC I have two separate physical hard drives. Drive #1: C:\ only has the OS and any application software I run. Physical internal drive #2 stores all files, photos, videos and music.

My back up. I have an external WD drive and am running Second Copy software to do a simple copy of every file on my internal drive #2 over to the external drive.

I replace the external drive every year or two just because they are inexpensive.

Thanks!

 

[sminlal]

It's probably a decent enough backup for your purposes. It would be a little safer if you used two external drives and alternated between them, so that if it comes time to do a restore and you find a problem with one drive you've still got the other one to fall back on. For real peace of mind store the one you most recently backed up to offsite. Failing that, at least make sure to store it somewhere away from the computer so that they don't both get stolen when someone breaks into your house.

Also, be sure that you have a couple of copies of all of the software discs and their installation keys squirreled away safely somewhere, since if you loose your C: drive you'll have to reinstall everything.

 

[garywi]

Thanks!