Backing up HDD

[R.A.J.]

I have about 150GB home video Mostly M2TS & Quite a lot of still photos & always growing.

I have a 500GB external HDD which I use for hopefully preserving such in case my laptop HDD fails.

But using "windows backup" seems to take so long even used as an incremental device .

It seems simpler just to overwrite directories using windows explorer.
The ext. HDD came with "EMC Retrospect" but that wasn't any better.

What method do you use?

[mike20021969]

What method do you use?

I use Acronis True Image Home Version 10 - it's moved on a version or 3 now though.
After doing a full back up, I then do incremental back ups every so often.

I've never used it myself, but this freebie back up software seems good on the surface.
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/features.html

[ranchhand]

I have used Macrium Reflect free version for a couple of years and like it a lot. Acronis vs11 wimped out on me the first time I had an emergency restore, their "support" hid under the bed and never answered me, so no more Acronis for me. I have restored with MR several times with great result. The only thing I suggest is that you make sure your external drive is formatted with NTFS (not FAT32) because the image creation is faster, and you don't end up with a series of 4gig entries. I do complete images only for my 1TB drive, takes about 30 minutes. In addition, by clicking on the image on your external drive MR launches a virtual drive and all your data is available in an Explore type tree structure any time you want to retrieve a single file for some reason. Nice.

[budwzr]

Goodsync.