After just having my laptop hard drive crash on me and losing 5 years of data, I need to invest into some backup equipment. I am considering a 1tb external hard drive. I would just like to know the opinions for the best backup software to run with it? I have 3 computers networked and I would like for the external hard drive to service all of them. Something that will backup all new files on any of my PCs at a certain time everyday. I would like it to be able to do all from one PC so I am not connecting the external hard drive to all the computers everyday. Is there anything out there that will do what I am looking for?

Hi Damian,

A NAS (network attached storage) drive would be best for this purpose, it is basically a little mini computer attached to your router so any PC on the network can connect to it at any time. You don't need to have one PC on all the time to allow access to the hard drive.

Do you have a budget? I could have a look around and find a suitable drive if you like.

For backup software it depends on what you want to backup?

my 2 desktop computers have 250gb hard drives and my laptop will have a 160gb hard drive. I will probably be adding another computer in the near future so I figured a 1tb external hard drive would work well for backup space. I have seen them for around $100 so it seems like a cheap way to go

I just looked up some info on what a NAS was, and its not what I am looking for.

let me give more detail. I am going to get a 1tb external hard drive. I am going to connect it to my main desktop PC. I will make it a shared drive over my network. I want to find backup software that I will install on all of my computers that will perform automatic backups and store them on the shared drive on the external hard drive

I posted this a while back, it's a list of backup and restore software that may help you...

http://www.pchelpforum.com/general-s...tml#post373602

thanks for that list of programs. that is definately a starting point. I am just wondering if anyone knows a program off hand that can be setup to automatically backup new or updated files everyday?

I have 3 PCs now and soon to be adding a 4th. I would like the backup process to be as hands-free as possible... meaning I don't want to go to every computer to manually backup new files every night.

Setting up the external hard drive to be a shared drive among all the PCs in my network seems to be the easy part. I just need to find the backup software that will do the things I stated above.

Hi, a friend of my has a nice piece of backup equipment coming his way soon : a set of two hard drives, attached to his network. Both drives are 1 Terabyte, they have the necesarry software coming with them to not only backup whatever they are told to (withon the network) but they function as backups for each other. So the capacity is not 2 Tb but the safety is enormous. Alas I forgot the name, but I'll find it out if you want.