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Best practices for a home computer?

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Ok. So I succumbed to the junk mail and upgraded to TI2014 and 250Gb of cloud storage. Now what should I do?

I read (most of) the manual. Too many options. Too much information for a simple guy like me. I'm looking for a one-click solution to securing my data.

I'm running Win7 on a 4 year old computer with 4 hard drives totaling about 700Gb of data spread across 1.5Tb of disk space. I'll never repair this machine. If it goes down I'll build a new one on new hardware. I'll never clone this machine to Win8 or new hardware. (I believe Windows needs a good whackin' periodically. Reinstalling OS and apps is nearly mandatory every so often...) Much of my data is static, archival, crufty crap that probably should get deep sixed but I don't want to sort through it all to decide what goes and what stays. But there is "current", active data that I use on at least 3 drives.

Probably 350Gb of my 700Gb is my iTunes library of ripped CDs. All Apple lossless, so I don't expect any additional compression if I try to back them up. (I can re-rip but that would take a LOT of time...) Probably 100Gb is photos - probably ditto on compressing those. (I can't get these back...) Then there are a lot of DAW libraries with audio samples. They might compress. (I can reinstall without too much problem.) I have email and documents, quicken backups, etc. that are critical to me.

So where do I start? I want automatic backup to the cloud. I'd also like to ease the task of migrating my data to a new computer. (As stated, I would install the OS and apps prior to trying to restore my data.)

Any best practices and/or specific direction would be appreciated.

Cheers!

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For starters, you should get yourself a large external USB hard drive. Use it to move data onto it, which you hardly ever use. This will give you some space to consolidate your active data on one disk.

Most probably you won't be able to use your internal hard drives with your (eventually) new computer. So there is another good reason to throw old data from your computer.

After that clear one hard drive from any data and let TrueImage use this one to make automatic backups of your active data. Backing up data tends to be much faster if you use different hard drives.

And finally, you can still choose what data to move into your cloud storage.