types of hard drives & backup system

i have found out about the different ways for me for disk storage and also backup system, but i am not sure which is the best for me so i need pro opinions on this!

1. buying an 80gb hard disk and use a partition cd to divide into the main and backup hard drive?

2. or just buy an external hard disk for backup?

3. sign up for the online backup system?

i hope you guys can help me consider these choices!

 

Out of them no. 1 & 2 seem pretty similar; but I would recommend buying an external hard disk for backup. In any case in which your master disk fails compeltely making the drive unuseable and the contents lost then you have another disk with the important data on.
If you partition your drive then its only a logical backup system, but its still on one physical drive.
Or if your feeling a bit more adventurous, you can try using RAID (Redundant Array of Independany Disks) to mirror your drive.

 

what is the RAID? is there any website that explains its feature?

 

For a home user for backup you can use RAID 1.
RAID 1 works by mirroring two completely identical drives to act as one virtual drive. You don't get double the capacity but you get a more reliable PC. Using RAID 1, each drive contains exactly the same data. Say you save a 10mb file to your one logical drive (which is actually 2 identical drives), both drives write the same file to the same place on each disk. The advantage is that if and when one of the drive fails, you have an exact copy one your other drive. So you just carry on using your remaining drive while you replace the broken one. Once you replace the damaged drive the new drive will take a while to mirror your remaining drive and thus your RAID array is restored.

Here's a better explaination: http://www.webhostgear.com/172.html

 

Also note that RAID is harder to implement than other backup systems but requires the least maintenance. If you just want to have a backup copy of your important files and not go to such lengths I'd recommend buying an external disk for manual backups.

 

WOW. thats g8! thanks!

 

id personally buy a seperate hard drive, or backing up certain programs on dual layer dvds also works well for back ups as well as backing up the system after just installing xp

 

an idea i had while looking for a backup was to buy a hard drive based mp3 player i got a 40gb model and it has a load of music on and all my photos, and other stuff (nothing too personal as it may get stolen or lost) , saves some money and gets used in the car instead of tapes or cd's