After loosing my data hard drive recently to what appears to be a broken armature (meaning it is screwed), I have had to find out about recovery and back up options. It appears one of the big names in recovery is, DataSavers. A few recovery facts; it costs the same to recover one file as the whole drive, the cost is depended on the size of the drive, and in my case with a 160GB is was between $500 - $2500 and they said 90% of jobs come in on the top 1/3rd. I opted not to do that.

Since I have purchased 2 new drives, one another SATA internal and a new IDE external to replace the downed drive. The previous drive was a Maxtor, so I'd be damned if I was going to buy another one of those, and after talking to some Techs, I was told they are crap. I was told to go with Western Digital or Seagate, Seagates have a 5yr warranty as opposed to a 3yr so I went with them. So I ended up with a 200GB system drive, 200GB SATA internal data drive, and a 200GB external using a Metal Gear external firewire drive.

For backing up, I wanted something I did not have to think about, very easy, schedue-able and transparent.

Windows XP has built in back up software in Accessories > System Tools > Backup. I tried this, it schedules and is built into the OS which is great, and it allows you to specify what folders you want backed up and but it backs up to special .bkf file which then needs XP to restore the compressed file. I wanted something more sure, plus I wanted to be able to swap drives to another computer easy if something happened.

Now the Seagate IDE drive came with backup software, BounceBack Express. It seemed cool enough, it lets you schedule full file backups at regular intervals but, it was a piece of shit. Mainly because it is an application that needs to load, so it takes up resources. Working the night after I installed it, my floppy drive started making clicking noises every few seconds, plus I began to get "Delayed write failures" in XP, like every 2 seconds. I uninstalled the app and all the problems went away. Bad software, stay away.

Then I found MirrorFolder., a product from Calcutta, India. A slick little app that integrates into XP and allows you to choose which folders to mirror to another location, local drive, network drive, or even on the same drive. You can exclude file types or folders (excluding things such as PSD temp scratch disk files) and it does not need to schedule because it works constantly in the back ground. It totally integrates into XP, so there is no extra app to startup or to sit in the tray, just right click on what you want to mirror, folder or drive and set it up, just like it is part of XP. So far I have not seen a noticeable performance hit and it can also be used to sync drives from notebooks to local drives and such. Free for 30 days, 39$ after that, cheap for piece of mind.