What is the best way to backup a hard drive?

Snag a 1 TB external hard drive (I bought mine for about $70) then backup your stuff through Windows control panel (assuming your using Windows, Mac has another backup option somewhere.). Dropbox is good but $200 a year is still way more than you'll spend on an external hard drive and you don't get nearly the same amount of space. Dropbox is for quick files but for everything, external backup all the way.

Dropbox!

2GB Basic Free

50GB Pro 50 $9.99/month or $99.00/year

100GB Pro 100 $19.99/month or $199.00/year

Personally I use external hard drives placed in a safe location.

i would recommend a external hard drive. depends what you want to save?

Documents: 4-8gb Junk drive. 15 bucks tops at meijer.

Media / pictures i would say you wouldn't need anything more than 250 GB which go for about 50 bucks at best buy. i personally have a western Digital 1TB External Dock with a wall mount power supply. which has a backup feature on there that i have 3 and 2 laptops backed up on there also. and i also have a Seagate 1TB express external hard drive that i bring with me everywhere and that just has programs tv shows and my games on there. it just depends on what you want to backup

Norton Ghost is a great backup program but it's unnecessary. Other people are saying external hard drives, which is probably the most convenient way to do backups but I would recommend using DVDs. DVDs can hold data for a much longer time than hard drives; I think it's something like 1000 years or so. I guess it would really depend on what you are wanting to backup and how long you need it backed up for. Also, size could be a factor too. If you need to backup large files or a bunch of files, I might go with the hard drive for the convenience.

external drive or extra internal drive, then use gparted (free) to copy the entire drive to the backup drive.

Avoid automated backups if possible, especially ones which do incremental backups and remove older versions as more space is needed. (a friend of mine had a auto backup which replaced good backups with infected ones)

A manual backup ensures that you are getting the best backup.

While online off site backups can be useful, they are expensive (generally for the cost, you can you can but multiple new hard drives per year and eventually tine your walls with hard drives containing your backups :) )

A risk of online backups is not all of them encrypt your data before leaving your system meaning the company has access to your data and if they are hacked then the hacker also has access, government will also have access.

Another risk is you can put hundreds or thousands of dollars into years of using the service, only for them to go out of business, taking your backups with them, or changes in the service requiring you to cancel the service, then you will feel that the money you put in over the years could have better spent encrypting the drive full of backups and mailing it to a friends house, or putting the monthly cost into purchasing a faster internet connection, then using a router with dd-wrt or tomato, create a VPN tunnel between your router and a friends or family members router who has a NAS that you can use, then do a backup to it when ever needed.

(before I found out about doing a ppptp tunnel to have a friend backup his system to a partition that I set up for him on my old PC which I use as a data server, we used to use utorrent to perform backups)

I would have to say RAID configurations are the best method of hard drive backup. If drives in the array fail, pop in replacement drives. Data from the remaining drives will theoretically populate the new drives. I also have used RETROSPECT which can be configured to make incremental & full backups. Combine the above with off premises storage, for another layer of backup.

RAID, acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks (originally Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks), is a storage technology that provides increased reliability and functions through redundancy. This is achieved by combining multiple disk drive components into a logical unit, where data is distributed across the drives in one of several ways called "RAID levels"; this concept is an example of storage virtualization and was first defined by David A. Patterson, Garth A. Gibson, and Randy Katz at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987 as Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks.[1] Marketers representing industry RAID manufacturers later attempted to reinvent the term to describe a redundant array of independent disks as a means of dissociating a low-cost expectation from RAID technology.[2]