Just bought a no-name aluminium USB/Firewire HD case (HK$215) and a WD 160GB (HK$550) and did a complete backup of my iMac. It took ages (about 2 hours, but you could still use the computer while it is doing the backup), but I can now sleep soundly at night. Further backups are also going to be relatively quick.
I had an older WD 160GB in a BAFO case. It stopped working. Good thing it’s only a backup drive and I have everything on the computers. Bought it from Jumbo in the beginning of 2005, so it is still under the 3 years warranty period. I am going to take it back to Jumbo and ask them to do the exchange for me, it’s much easier, as I learned from last time when one of HDs of mother went bad.
I put a spare 80GB into the BOFA case and plugged it into my X40. Then I did a full backup using IBM’s own Rapid Restore software onto the internal HD. However, this isn’t of much use if the laptop HD goes belly up or the laptop gets stolen. Good thing Rapid Restore allowed copying the backup sets to an external HD or the network. Now I have two sets of backups for my X40, on the internal HD and on the USB HD.
Backing up your data (i.e. making copies of your documents) is easy. Backing up your computer (i.e. making an exact copy of the hard disk of your computer, including the applications and your own data) OTOH is harder. The reason why you want to do the latter is because, in case of a catastrophe, you want to be up and running as quickly as possible, and not to spend a whole day to reinstall your OS plus your applications.
On the Microsoft Windows side, we have a few options to “clone” a hard disk, such as Norton Ghost. The more technical folks could use G4L or boot the machine into *nix and do a dd. I am not convinced that they are ideal solutions, ‘cos these operations cannot be done in the background. Ghost actually reboots your computer to run the DOS-based program, and for both G4L and *nix you’d also need to shutdown your Windows computer and reboot into the appropriate environments.
Then you need to have the blind faith that the backup would work. Restoring the image to a different computer for testing may not work, ‘cos of the different hardware configuration. It is also not likely that many people would have a spare modern computer lying around at home for testing purposes.
The backup SuperDuper! creates is bootable, so you could just boot from the backup and check that the system is working and the data is intact. This is the ultimate peace of mind.
With Rapid Restore, in the event of a HD failure, I assume that Lenovo would put a new HD into my X40 and restore everything to factory default, and I would be able to recover fully with my BOFA USB HD from there on, which I suppose is good enough. I’d still have to rely on blind faith thou.
I planned to Ghost my X40 HD, then wipe the HD and do a full restore with Rapid Restore. For some reasons Ghost wouldn’t run with the BOFA plugged in. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and go for a LaCie or something.