Building new PC, how should I back-up my data?

[Chaosrider]

Hey guys, I just bought the parts for my new PC, most of them are here, just waiting for the rest to come, hopefully by this weekend.

Today I started to go through my hard drive and determine what was worth keeping. I've decided that out of the close to 400GB of data, 182.2GB is worth keeping.

With that in mind, how should I go about backing up that data - external hard drive, a bunch of dvds? I really have no idea what would be the most cost effective and would like your help.

I would really like to try to keep the cost as low as possible.

[zoefschildpad]

just put the disk in the new pc and copy over the files?

[Chaosrider]

My idea was to save what I wanted and wipe the rest, so I need somewhere to put the 182GB in the meantime. Sorry if my post sounded stupid, this is my first time building a PC.

EDIT: I just looked into DropBox, and I could pay $20.00 for 1 month of 200GB storage. Does that sound like a viable option?

[procne]

At that price I would think about buying some small HDD. There should be some 250 GB drives for less than 30$ available.
And this way you don't publish your data to any third party (ie DropBox).

edit: If I understand correctly you plan to reuse your old HDD in new PC. If so, how many partitions, and how big you have currently?

[chazus]

Why not just plug the old drive into the new system temporarily, copy over what you want after the OS is installed, and then put the old drive back into the old system and wipe it.

I'm assuming that you want to keep the old drive in the old system and the old system will remain usable. A bit more info as to what you're doing, what you have, and what you're getting would be nice.

[Chaosrider]

My bad, I'm reusing my HDD in the new build, and wanted to start fresh after I backed up my media, documents, and game saves.

Today I picked up an external hard drive that was on sale.