CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

My laptop recently gave me an overheating scare so I'd like to back her up. Is there anyway to do this freely on-line or must it be done on CD? The problem with this is my laptop doesn't burn DVDs and there's waaay too much stuff on her for a CD. Any alternatives that are cheap/free?

A reliable, fast, sure, not-quite-as-cheap method, would be to back up onto an external hard disk (on firewire or USB).

External hard drive is your best bet, for safety, speed, reliability and recoverability. Drives of this sort are now less than a dollar a Gig, and are by far the most efficiant backup tool.

The only "free" way online to do it that I can think of would be to transfer your files to a friend's server over the Internets, and that would take heinous amounts of time and dumb luck. External hard drives FTW.

.rai//

If you have a friend with any storage devices, you might wanna ask. But I know how you feel... my laptop can only read DVDs...

I assume you are speaking of just copying the data, not creating an image to restore your entire laptop, should it fail.

I agree an external hard drive is the best. You can even image your laptop onto the external drive and do a complete restore of your machine, if you wanted to go that route.

The cheapest way is to burn a lot of CD's. At the very least, you could categorize them so you know easily what's on which CD. This will also help you up date you back-up. If you know where a new file belongs, then you only need to re-burn that CD.

Another choice is to use a flash drive. I've seen 4 Gig drives for less than $50. If you have more than 4 gig worth of data to store, this quickly becomes both a pain to manage and a bit cost-prohibitive in comparison to getting an external HD.