So what backup software do you use...
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For years I found that the built-in NTBACKUP served my needs very well thank you. It had sufficient flexibility to allow me to script simple backup jobs for Full and Differential quite easily. However since its demise in Vista and W7 I have tried a number of solutions the most recent being Acronis True Image which I came with one of my machines. Now Acronis seemed to be working fine until I decided to implement daily incremental backups a few weeks ago at which point the driver, it uses to access the specially formatted partition, kept hanging my x64 W7 machine daily. I prefer run the backups as my machine starts if it is not alive at the time I scheduled the previous evening. So while I crawl the various bits of advertising and reviews of backup software I wondered what solutions others might be using/recommend. Commercial or Freeware? Full with incremental or just full? Daily, weekly or other? Any lessons learned from past mistakes? I will start the ball rolling with the last one. A few years ago I was responsible for managing the local copy of source code for the team I was part of. Discussions with the local IT they decided that using tape backup was too expensive so they provided us with an alternate server with a 10 disk array. The array was configured as Raid 5 + 'hot standby'. All went well until one of the drives failed after about 4 months but the 'hot standby' drive was automatically activated so all was good. The bad drive was replaced and the array began it's rebuild. Only thing was a few hours later another drive failed while the rebuild was in progress closely followed by a 3rd which caused the array to collapse. I learned that when our IT was building the array for us they purchased 10 new drives. All 10 were from the same batch from the same manufacturer. Lesson learned: If you are building a disk array don't use the disks from the same manufacturer or at least from different batch builds.
Alan
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For years I found that the built-in NTBACKUP served my needs very well thank you. It had sufficient flexibility to allow me to script simple backup jobs for Full and Differential quite easily. However since its demise in Vista and W7 I have tried a number of solutions the most recent being Acronis True Image which I came with one of my machines. Now Acronis seemed to be working fine until I decided to implement daily incremental backups a few weeks ago at which point the driver, it uses to access the specially formatted partition, kept hanging my x64 W7 machine daily. I prefer run the backups as my machine starts if it is not alive at the time I scheduled the previous evening. So while I crawl the various bits of advertising and reviews of backup software I wondered what solutions others might be using/recommend. Commercial or Freeware? Full with incremental or just full? Daily, weekly or other? Any lessons learned from past mistakes? I will start the ball rolling with the last one. A few years ago I was responsible for managing the local copy of source code for the team I was part of. Discussions with the local IT they decided that using tape backup was too expensive so they provided us with an alternate server with a 10 disk array. The array was configured as Raid 5 + 'hot standby'. All went well until one of the drives failed after about 4 months but the 'hot standby' drive was automatically activated so all was good. The bad drive was replaced and the array began it's rebuild. Only thing was a few hours later another drive failed while the rebuild was in progress closely followed by a 3rd which caused the array to collapse. I learned that when our IT was building the array for us they purchased 10 new drives. All 10 were from the same batch from the same manufacturer. Lesson learned: If you are building a disk array don't use the disks from the same manufacturer or at least from different batch builds.
Alan
Rule 0. I you go cheap it might get very expensive. Remember that there are several reasons for making a backup. 1. The users are idiots! Everyone is an idiot sometime. So make sure you have enough storage space on your fileserver and configure shadowcopy to save a new version of every changed file several times a day. That is the easiest way to retrieve a deleted or overwritten file. 2. Hardware failure. Always save your backup onto another type of media. The chance that both types fail at the same time is not that big. 3. Fire or burglary. You need to have a copy of your data offsite so that you can retrieve your data if your equipment goes missing. I'm taking last weeks tape(s) to the bank vault every week. Another option is copying the data over the internet to another location, but it tends to be expensive and less efficient than advertised. Make sure you always get a mail from the program (we use backup exec) on completion. Setting it to mail you when something is wrong is useless, if something is wrong it won't. To further eliminate the human factor we're using a tape robot. That allows me to be sick or go on vacation without having to trust my coworkers (see point 1).
"When did ignorance become a point of view" - Dilbert
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For years I found that the built-in NTBACKUP served my needs very well thank you. It had sufficient flexibility to allow me to script simple backup jobs for Full and Differential quite easily. However since its demise in Vista and W7 I have tried a number of solutions the most recent being Acronis True Image which I came with one of my machines. Now Acronis seemed to be working fine until I decided to implement daily incremental backups a few weeks ago at which point the driver, it uses to access the specially formatted partition, kept hanging my x64 W7 machine daily. I prefer run the backups as my machine starts if it is not alive at the time I scheduled the previous evening. So while I crawl the various bits of advertising and reviews of backup software I wondered what solutions others might be using/recommend. Commercial or Freeware? Full with incremental or just full? Daily, weekly or other? Any lessons learned from past mistakes? I will start the ball rolling with the last one. A few years ago I was responsible for managing the local copy of source code for the team I was part of. Discussions with the local IT they decided that using tape backup was too expensive so they provided us with an alternate server with a 10 disk array. The array was configured as Raid 5 + 'hot standby'. All went well until one of the drives failed after about 4 months but the 'hot standby' drive was automatically activated so all was good. The bad drive was replaced and the array began it's rebuild. Only thing was a few hours later another drive failed while the rebuild was in progress closely followed by a 3rd which caused the array to collapse. I learned that when our IT was building the array for us they purchased 10 new drives. All 10 were from the same batch from the same manufacturer. Lesson learned: If you are building a disk array don't use the disks from the same manufacturer or at least from different batch builds.
Alan
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For years I found that the built-in NTBACKUP served my needs very well thank you. It had sufficient flexibility to allow me to script simple backup jobs for Full and Differential quite easily. However since its demise in Vista and W7 I have tried a number of solutions the most recent being Acronis True Image which I came with one of my machines. Now Acronis seemed to be working fine until I decided to implement daily incremental backups a few weeks ago at which point the driver, it uses to access the specially formatted partition, kept hanging my x64 W7 machine daily. I prefer run the backups as my machine starts if it is not alive at the time I scheduled the previous evening. So while I crawl the various bits of advertising and reviews of backup software I wondered what solutions others might be using/recommend. Commercial or Freeware? Full with incremental or just full? Daily, weekly or other? Any lessons learned from past mistakes? I will start the ball rolling with the last one. A few years ago I was responsible for managing the local copy of source code for the team I was part of. Discussions with the local IT they decided that using tape backup was too expensive so they provided us with an alternate server with a 10 disk array. The array was configured as Raid 5 + 'hot standby'. All went well until one of the drives failed after about 4 months but the 'hot standby' drive was automatically activated so all was good. The bad drive was replaced and the array began it's rebuild. Only thing was a few hours later another drive failed while the rebuild was in progress closely followed by a 3rd which caused the array to collapse. I learned that when our IT was building the array for us they purchased 10 new drives. All 10 were from the same batch from the same manufacturer. Lesson learned: If you are building a disk array don't use the disks from the same manufacturer or at least from different batch builds.
Alan
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How old is your version of Acronis?
Join the cool kids - Come fold with us[^]
2010 + change I'm used to using NTBackup which may be crude but it did the job and gave the the fexibility of backup type in addition to it being easy to schedule. Is it me or are all the backup suites becoming so much bloatware? Don't even get me started on Backup Exec.. My requirements are quite simple: - Flexible backup options (Whole disk, full and incremental). - Simple naming to allow grandfather, father and child versioning. - Individual file/ folder restore - x64 supported (or at least does not break if it is running on x64) Too much at ask?
Alan