Best free backup solution?

[Matias_Chambers]

So I have a few things on my PC that I don't want to lose. What would be the best free backup solution? Can I do RAID with my current storage setup? By the way all the drives besides the 1 TB HDD and SSD are laptop hard drives that I took from broken laptops that I have.

 

PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/L8t8M8
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/L8t8M8/by_merchant/

Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($90.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Western Digital WD Blue 320GB 2.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($44.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Storage: Seagate Momentus 5400.6 500GB 2.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($43.95 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Western Digital WD Blue 500GB 2.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($44.95 @ SuperBiiz) 
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($47.49 @ OutletPC) 
Total: $272.37
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-07-25 13:01 EDT-0400

Edited July 25, 2016 by Matias_Chambers

[Enderman]

RAID is NOT a replacement for backups.

[Damocles]

Raid Vs backup, both protects against drive failure, RAID protects some, but backups protect all drives. RAID doesn't protect against viruses as the virus would have spread to even the RAID mirrors

[Matias_Chambers]

4 minutes ago, Enderman said:

RAID is NOT a replacement for backups.

Well RAID 1 is more reliable than no RAID at all. 

[Enderman]

1 minute ago, Matias_Chambers said:

Well RAID 1 is more reliable than no RAID at all. 

With the amount of corruptions from crappy raid controllers, no it is not.

If you want to do raid either use the software raid on a server-grade motherboard or use a dedicated raid card.

Because software raid on consumer motherboards is just horrible.

[Beeeyeee]

get an external Hard drive, they're super cheap. just plug it in, transfer what you need every week or so, and stick it in  a safe or soemthing, that way, if theres a fire, you can just grab that HDD and run out and you won't loose anything.

[xc3ll]

Best free Backup Solution? Easy: Windows System Image Backup.

It's not easy to find, nor especially feature-rich, but compared to other ad-infected crap-free-ware out there, it works.

 

If you want to try it, you have to have an NTFS-formated external HDD with at least as much space as your used disk capacity. Plug it in and then type "sdclt" (*) into the windows search and hit enter. On the left you should be able to click "system image" (or something like it...). Then just hit next, till it starts.

Pro Tip: Since this is a full 1:1 copy of all your drives, it might take ages to backup large disks. Within the utility you can not exclude certain drives, but you can go to "Disk Management" (Win + X, Disk Management) and right click on your physical drive and set it to "offline" before you do the backup. Now Windows won't "see" the drive and won't include it in the backup. After you're done, you can just as easily set the drive to online again and do your daily business

 

(*) No, "sdclt" is no secret command to kill your pc. But since microsoft decided to bury this very usefull functionality so deep in their os, it's the fastest way to get there. Oh and try to find it with windows search using the keyword "backup"... Doesn't work (most of the time...)

 

[Captain_WD]

14 hours ago, Matias_Chambers said:

~snip~

Hey there

 

My two cents on this:

 

Though RAID should never be considered a backup, it can provide you some safety against certain types of failure. There are some specifics and some risks that RAID hides, even with the provided redundancy:

- if the whole controller fails you are likely to lose all data on all drives.

- RAID doesn't really grant you safety against malware, user errors, physical damage (electrical outage, shortage, theft, etc.) and other similar things

- RAID itself puts the drives under more pressure compared to when they are used as standalone drives, regardless of the RAID type

- if the drives are not RAID-rated (in your case the WD Blue drives are NOT) and they don't have the necessary features such as TLER to perform safely and have reduced chances of dropping out you are likely to have data corruption and drive dropouts from your RAID. 

 

A separate backup would give you safety against all of these things as it is always a better idea to have your data on two separate storage devices not connected to each other than to have then in the same device. I would recommend to use some of these drives as backup devices in enclosures or in a NAS rather then in an internal RAID array if you want true safety for your data. 

 

Feel free to ask questions

 

Captain_WD.

[leadeater]

You can use 'Windows Backup and Restore (Windows 7)' which is found in Windows 7 and above, the afore mentioned Windows Image Backup by @xc3ll is this. You can find it in Control Panel. Another good free tool is Veeam Endpoint Backup Free.