What backup software do you use?
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My past laptop allowed me to quickly pop out the main drive and image it (I have a SATA to SATA disk duplicator). The new laptop is a little more difficult to get into - I actually have three SSDs in it: c: OS, application sw, etc d: main development SSD, project files e: virtual machines The C drive is one of the new pci m.2 form factor beasts, so it's not like I can pop it out like I used to do. Suggestions for backup software that will: (1) allow me to image an OS drive (2) background incremental backups - I'm thinking a 4 TB drive hung off my usb 3.0 hub. thanks
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Veeam Endpoint Backup Free, Image-based bare metal restore, and incremental.
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My past laptop allowed me to quickly pop out the main drive and image it (I have a SATA to SATA disk duplicator). The new laptop is a little more difficult to get into - I actually have three SSDs in it: c: OS, application sw, etc d: main development SSD, project files e: virtual machines The C drive is one of the new pci m.2 form factor beasts, so it's not like I can pop it out like I used to do. Suggestions for backup software that will: (1) allow me to image an OS drive (2) background incremental backups - I'm thinking a 4 TB drive hung off my usb 3.0 hub. thanks
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I have used SyncBackFree for years for file backup and never had a problem with back or recovery. The paid version can do versioning of backups. I use EaseUS TodoBackup Free for disk imaging--it's remarkably quick (but I have not tested recovery, probably like most folks). NTI BackupEZ came with a soap-on-a-rope Toshiba USB drive and I used that for almost a year. It was slow-w-w-w and never ran without errors when doing file/directory backup. It was horrible to uninstall. CCleaner, IObit Uninstaller & Control Panel could not uninstall it. I was able to download a MS tool to expunge it. You have been warned.
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My past laptop allowed me to quickly pop out the main drive and image it (I have a SATA to SATA disk duplicator). The new laptop is a little more difficult to get into - I actually have three SSDs in it: c: OS, application sw, etc d: main development SSD, project files e: virtual machines The C drive is one of the new pci m.2 form factor beasts, so it's not like I can pop it out like I used to do. Suggestions for backup software that will: (1) allow me to image an OS drive (2) background incremental backups - I'm thinking a 4 TB drive hung off my usb 3.0 hub. thanks
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Imaging: Macrium Reflect is my preference for Imaging. Also allows for incremental and other options. VMWare: Robocopy only to an 8TB external drive. Code: Network storage, and above drive. Far quicker. I used to use Cobian Backup for a lot of stuff. It allows for zip or direct copies. Looks like the author has sold it however.
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I don't see how Carbonite can handle (a) system images and (b) massive amounts of data for $60/year? (b) oh wait - *unlimited* storage for a system, okay, that changed the last time I looked at them. That would only be 18 hours for the initial capture, much less for incremental backups. I'll have to look into that. One issue I have is making sure I am disaster proof - fire, theft, tornado. (a) how did it handle the system disk restore? A major pain point for me is restoring all of the installed software. cg
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I used Carbonite for a couple of years, but on two occasions when I needed to restore relatively small amounts of data, the restore went unbelievably slowly - to the extent that I could not imagine trying to recover from a real disaster that way. I now use Acronis (which seems to be much more reliable and stable than it was up to a couple of years ago) for local backup, mainly of system files, to a NAS device, and CrashPlan Pro for continuous backup of documents and data. I have been very impressed with the latter program - occasional problems have been dealt with promptly by support people who know their product and care about their users.
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My past laptop allowed me to quickly pop out the main drive and image it (I have a SATA to SATA disk duplicator). The new laptop is a little more difficult to get into - I actually have three SSDs in it: c: OS, application sw, etc d: main development SSD, project files e: virtual machines The C drive is one of the new pci m.2 form factor beasts, so it's not like I can pop it out like I used to do. Suggestions for backup software that will: (1) allow me to image an OS drive (2) background incremental backups - I'm thinking a 4 TB drive hung off my usb 3.0 hub. thanks
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Veeam endpoint backup is free and creates image and bootable CD to make full recovery easier including drivers. It does incremental on schedule keeping configurable number of daily versions available. Individual file restore easily accomplished.
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OneDrive seems pretty good.
OneDrive chokes when used for code backup. It cannot handle all the intermediate and output files created by build processes. It just stops syncing, never completing its "scanning for changes... " routine. This is with the pro plan (1 TB). Happened to me twice. Took an act of congress to get sync working again. Now I use git repos outside OneDrive for all my code storage and all is well. For OS and app backup I use Acronis True Image. Fast, flexible, reliable, but not cheap. Then again, what would you give in an emergency to get your data back?
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OneDrive chokes when used for code backup. It cannot handle all the intermediate and output files created by build processes. It just stops syncing, never completing its "scanning for changes... " routine. This is with the pro plan (1 TB). Happened to me twice. Took an act of congress to get sync working again. Now I use git repos outside OneDrive for all my code storage and all is well. For OS and app backup I use Acronis True Image. Fast, flexible, reliable, but not cheap. Then again, what would you give in an emergency to get your data back?
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Imaging: Macrium Reflect is my preference for Imaging. Also allows for incremental and other options. VMWare: Robocopy only to an 8TB external drive. Code: Network storage, and above drive. Far quicker. I used to use Cobian Backup for a lot of stuff. It allows for zip or direct copies. Looks like the author has sold it however.
I used Cobian for years to backup to external drives that I would rotate through. It does direct copy, which is nice for retrieval and compatibility, but was slow doing full backup sets. I've since switched to CrashPlan about a year ago. I use CrashPlan for both cloud backup and local backup. While initial cloud backup can take a while, it's much faster afterwards, and also keeps file history so you can get old versions of files easily. The same software for online backup is also used for local backup to a NAS drive (mirrored) for the "golden 3-2-1" backup rule. (3 backup copies of data, 2 onsite and 1 off-site).
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My past laptop allowed me to quickly pop out the main drive and image it (I have a SATA to SATA disk duplicator). The new laptop is a little more difficult to get into - I actually have three SSDs in it: c: OS, application sw, etc d: main development SSD, project files e: virtual machines The C drive is one of the new pci m.2 form factor beasts, so it's not like I can pop it out like I used to do. Suggestions for backup software that will: (1) allow me to image an OS drive (2) background incremental backups - I'm thinking a 4 TB drive hung off my usb 3.0 hub. thanks
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
First I treat systems files differently from data . I ALWAYS have at least 2 drives - at least C and D - C is ALWAYS SYSTEM ONLY and data on D and up - NO DATA IS ALLOWED ON C! I always make data on my RAMDRIVE and back it up as soon as I am done with BATch files that put it in 5 different places on my PC and on my network. I also have BATch files using ROBOCOPY to SYNC UP detachable back-up media like USB sticks or drives. For system back up I use FARSTONE Total Recovery Tools - and simply wouldn't use anything else. It boots to its own OS from its own media (I use USB stick) and thus does a system backup free from windoze interference. Works for me.
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My past laptop allowed me to quickly pop out the main drive and image it (I have a SATA to SATA disk duplicator). The new laptop is a little more difficult to get into - I actually have three SSDs in it: c: OS, application sw, etc d: main development SSD, project files e: virtual machines The C drive is one of the new pci m.2 form factor beasts, so it's not like I can pop it out like I used to do. Suggestions for backup software that will: (1) allow me to image an OS drive (2) background incremental backups - I'm thinking a 4 TB drive hung off my usb 3.0 hub. thanks
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Two layers. 1. Deepsoftware's StorageCraft - Backup of the c:\ drive, including boot sector. Backup of the D:\, E: & F:\ drives. Does a full backup every Sunday and incremental backups every 3 hours the PC is turned on. Backup 'files' are held on a NAS. I have a boot CD & thumb drive in case of the unthinkable. 2. AJC's Active Backup - Real time backup of the D:\, E:\ & F:\ files as the are saved after being changed in some manner. This supplements the StorageCraft's backups. Backup files are held on a separate SSD. HTH Regards, Ian
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My past laptop allowed me to quickly pop out the main drive and image it (I have a SATA to SATA disk duplicator). The new laptop is a little more difficult to get into - I actually have three SSDs in it: c: OS, application sw, etc d: main development SSD, project files e: virtual machines The C drive is one of the new pci m.2 form factor beasts, so it's not like I can pop it out like I used to do. Suggestions for backup software that will: (1) allow me to image an OS drive (2) background incremental backups - I'm thinking a 4 TB drive hung off my usb 3.0 hub. thanks
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
NovaBackup for file backups (dev source, etc). Use an external drive and keep 7 days' backups. Cobian backup for VMs. I can't say enough good about Cobian: it's free and uses ZIP format for the archives, so any unZIPPER can restore files. It has a very decent user interface, can be scheduled or run manually, and can run scripts either before or after a job. And, an entire backup job or set of jobs can be scripted. Again, I run a 7-day backup cycle to an external hard drive. For SQL server, I use the native SQL backup engine and run scheduled SQL backup jobs. The backup files can then be archived with any backup tool, including OneDrive or Dropbox.
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My past laptop allowed me to quickly pop out the main drive and image it (I have a SATA to SATA disk duplicator). The new laptop is a little more difficult to get into - I actually have three SSDs in it: c: OS, application sw, etc d: main development SSD, project files e: virtual machines The C drive is one of the new pci m.2 form factor beasts, so it's not like I can pop it out like I used to do. Suggestions for backup software that will: (1) allow me to image an OS drive (2) background incremental backups - I'm thinking a 4 TB drive hung off my usb 3.0 hub. thanks
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759