Thanks for the wonderful advice, James.

So I just purchased a beast of a external HD (2TB io Safe) http://www.amazon.com/Fireproof-Waterproof-External-Recovery-SL2000GBUSB20/dp/B002USP01Y/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1291803104&sr=8-2

I'm fairly inexperienced when it comes to the backup game, so I wanted some suggestions.

I have 2 TB so I partitioned the drive into 3 sections, (1) being a slim OS with nothing on it as you've recommend on past threads. (1) Being a personal file dump and (1) being a media drive.

I'm going to create an archive of JUST homefolder and just place that on the OS partition.

Now some Questions:

- Is that the correct method for a proper backup regarding the HomeFolder? Or should I do an actual startup folder backup?

- I'm an artist and work with particular folders often and want to set hourly captures of them. Do you suggest that I set up a new action rule in my HomeFolder archive; to capture my folders every hour? I'm thinking that I should set up an whole new archive to capture the folders and place that on my (Personal) partition.

- If I capture my HomeFolder and set it for daily captures, how often should someone verify the backup? Would a weekly verification be enough or should I do them more often? Is it safe to compact the HomeFolder archive? Also, I might have messed up on this but I made the OS Partiton no bigger than my working computers partition. I'm going to assume that QRecall wont have much play when it comes to rolling merges, so should I set up a new partition with added storage?

- I have some files that are on a PC. My iMac(which the Ext. HD is connected) and my PC share the same home network, with a cat5 cable running to each(no wireless). I would like to capture some partition drives off of my PC. No windows files, just media files(mp3s, avi's, various documents). Any way to create a backup method for them? Some of the drives are rather large (300 GB is the largest) so I'm assuming that it would take massive time to do this over cat5. In the meantime, I have Acronis backing up to another Wester Digital HD.

- I have Drive Genius 3 and DiskWarrior. Should I run some of these programs monthly for preventative measures? DiskWarrior recommends that you run their program on your HD once a month. I'm kind of the guy that likes to do scans to prevent any hiccups, but I know that sometimes I should just let things be...



I know that a lot of these questions are personal preferences, which I hope to gain with a little more time, trial, hopefully no error... But for those of you that have a large HD, what would your strategy be?

Thanks for the help.

I use DevonThink Pro and would like to back up my databases. I've read that it's not ideal to backup the contents of the database while the program is open (as with any backup program) so I set QRecall to backup my DevonThink Backups Folder. DevonThink makes a zip archive of the particular database and places it in the specified folder.

I have around 7 different zipped databases in my DT Backup folder. Some of them haven't been touched in months and some of them are updated often. So my question is if set a merge action in QRecall, could I lose some of the zipped files that haven't been touched in months? If I set it to merge the past (1) months worth of layers, could I lose a file that hasn't been recaptured in months?

I'm going to assume it won't, unless I delete the original zip file from the folder and a month passes...

I just want to make sure, though...

Also: I like your software!