What are best hardware/software for automated back-up to external hard drive?

Question

I'm wondering if we as a digipres community have centered on one or a few trusted solutions for ongoing, automated backup of personal data to physical media, i.e., external hard drives. I'm interested in hardware and software recommendations for a Windows environment. This would be active research data management, and the data is potentially valuable for the long-term. Any data identified for long-term preservation would be migrated to a trusted repository. Please, if there's anyone out there who can help me hone in on some trusted solutions of the zillions of options that seem to be out there in the PC world, I'd be much appreciative.

Answer 1

CrashPlan is a good option here. http://www.code42.com/crashplan/

CrashPlan is the name of both a cloud-based service and a free piece of backup software. We're only interested in the software here, which has receive a lot of use in hobbyist storage communities. The software lets you choose what directories to monitor, and mulitple storage locations including local, usb hard drives, network storage, and cloud storage (the service that they sell).

CrashPlan also journals instead of just backing up. This means that the software will store every version of a file, not just the latest one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journaling_file_system