# Once you've backed it up, how do you know what it is?

Category: Geeks r Us

## Post 1 by Nem (I just keep on posting!) on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2007 9:36:55

I want to back up some of my hard drives to a few cd's. I don't know how to label them for easy recall should I ever need them. Any suggestions would be great. Let me know how you all do it.

## Post 2 by BB (move over school!) on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2007 11:34:58

Get a CD case that holds a few CD's and place braille tape on the sleves where the CD's are located.

## Post 3 by rat (star trek rules!) on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2007 11:47:43

another idea is to skip the cds and go for an interal drive if you can.

## Post 4 by wildebrew (We promised the world we'd tame it, what were we hoping for?) on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2007 19:09:33

Hmm,.
Well, firstly I'd recommend a USB hard drive over the cd solution, knowing that it will cost you between 80 and 150 dollars, depending on size of hard drive and online offers.
They have portable hard drives, I used a 20GB one for a long time without problems, it fitted into my pocket perfectly and was usb powered. You can also go for bigger USB hard drives, if you are going to a different country with 240v voltage they generally have an adapter piece so you only need a new chord with the correct wall plug that plugs into the converter.
The pros are being able to back up data whenever and keeping it organized the way you want, you can even use software like Norton Ghost to make an exact copy of your hard drive and start up from it with a new computer or copy it exactly as is later on.
If you are still not convinced at least go with a dvd instead of cd, on account of it taking much more data and still being really cheap. I would back folders in alphabetical order onto each dvd and then ordering them in a cd case or marking them with the letter or letters they contain (the first letter of the folder names), that is if you are backing up a file system you organized into folders, something I love doing.
Best of luck
-B

## Post 5 by changedheart421 (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2007 19:24:30

get a external hard drive. tehy work the best.

## Post 6 by Nem (I just keep on posting!) on Wednesday, 10-Jan-2007 0:59:42

Aright here is what I decided to try. I went out and bought a pack of re-writeable DVD's and a zippered case. I get home and pop in a DVD to burn some files to it. The computer tells me the disk needs to be formatted first. So I do that. When I go to burn the files to the disk, it says it will take 26 minutes to burn. Is there a faster program for burning DVD's. I know it has a lot to do with your burner speed, but 26 minutes? Yeah it's also 4.5 gigs also. Does it take that long for anyone else? This is turning out to be a very long process. Oh back to the plot. After I burn the stuff to whatever disk works the fastest, I plan to use path copy and copy the file names to microsoft word and save them to a floppy disk for easy retrieval. That way I know just what's on what disk today, tomorrow, or a year from now. I don't have to worry about hard drive crashes or stupid malfunctions. But I have about 100 gigs to backup. Help please!
Nem-

## Post 7 by Nem (I just keep on posting!) on Wednesday, 10-Jan-2007 1:01:51

Oh yeah, I am trying to use easyCD DVD creator.

## Post 8 by rat (star trek rules!) on Wednesday, 10-Jan-2007 8:38:35

first you should consider yourself lucky. a dvd burn usually takes much longer than that. second, i don't think dvd's are the way to go for 100 gb of data. please think ab USB hardrives or internal drives for that much stuff.

## Post 9 by Jesse (Hmm!) on Wednesday, 10-Jan-2007 9:26:13

Nem,
It's going to naturally take that long for the system to write to DVD's.
Really, the external hard drive solution would've been the fastest, and best way to do your backups, and if all you're using the drive fo was backups, the drive would probably never malfunction on you. In fact, you would have a better chance of a DVD malfuntioning, especially an RW.
Jesse

## Post 10 by rat (star trek rules!) on Wednesday, 10-Jan-2007 10:30:23

very true, one scratch to a dvd and the data on it may be gone forever