best way to back up my data?

**filthygovmploye** · July 24th, 2012

have been runnin linux on a old presario v5000 laptopfor a while now. (7-8 months).
really diggin it, i have some mouse problems, and the touchpad is kinda a b!tch, but small price to pay for no virus and no beholding to The Man.

my problem is that the hardrive is gettin ready to take a dump. i get a big crazy warnnig on log in. i will postthe deets on that if its relevant. so, most of my documents etc are on the windows side of the partition,

question is what is the best way to back up that data from the windows side (and the ubuntu side) if i feel its corrupt? my documents shouldnt be, but i had a bad virus(?) that slowed mozilla to a crawl and would allow downloading....

i was thikning google documents, but i was being little paranoid aboot privacy, do i need to be? thanks

**Farhan** · July 24th, 2012

how much data and where do you plan to backup? external drive? internal drive? network server? online server? cloud? because it all depends on what you are trying to do.

**filthygovmploye** · July 25th, 2012

not much data. prob upload all pics to photobucket, hardrive islike 60 gigs, xp takes up like 25 right? so tops, 10 gigs. i was thinking to google documents server as i dont wanna go external for fear of retaining a virus. i guess a 16 gb flash drive might do me...., then i dont have to worry aboot google spyin on me

when \ if i geta new HD, their is no "archival" method of retaining xp? not that i reaaaaaaly want it, its just i have it now, and i am a packrat...

**oldfred** · July 25th, 2012

Some backup tools:

Backup windows before install - post by Mark Phelps
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1626990
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp
Another suggestion by srs5694
http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm

discussion of alternatives/strategy backups
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem

I prefer to backup most important data to DVDs periodically. And I backup to another drive my /home and some data from both my shared NTFS and data partitions to a backup partition. I presume I will reinstall system, so I do not include all the system in my backups, just my data and system configuration files. I have given up on XP, but it had so many applications, many paid for with serial numbers that I would need to reinstall that I consider it a lost cause. I only occasionally boot XP any more.