Backup software - any recommendations?

[budrico]

Buy a Mac which comes with time machine. Set it and forget it. Everything works automatically.

[cobra]

I use Retrospect 9.0, an industry leader in data back-up and file syncing.

It's a little spendy but is bullet proof and reliable, with phone support.

I essentially just file-sync certain folders, not the entire OS to a small pocket drive and keep that as a back-up, usually off-site.

The attendant Time Machine app on the Mac side is rock solid, Apple includes it free,

Having both Win and Mac machines I use both, so my pocket drive is partitioned 50/50,

one side for Windows, the other for my MacBook, works well.

[taotoo]

Buy a Mac which comes with time machine. Set it and forget it. Everything works automatically.

That applies equally to Win 8 File History and Win 7 Backup & Restore - no advantage in buying a Mac.

[budrico]

The list of advantages of Mac is a long one. I sold both window and Apple computers for four years in a large computer store. How about for starters I have never had use anti virus/malware software on my Macs. There are many reasons sales of Macs are increasing while Windows machines are declining and Apple has become the most valuable company (by far).

Sent from my iPhone using Thaivisa Connect Thailand

[sturdyd]

Just to muddy the water further, XXClone works very well for me. Apparently not too well known, but very good. They have a free version that will clone (bit-by-bit) your entire drive, which has saved me a couple of times, and a paid version that does incremental backups, scheduled, unattended & etc. Worth a look in my opinion.

[mokwit]

Pehaps someone can clarify: What is a disk "image" if it is not a copy of a hard drive?

BTW i have found Casper to be a very good back up product - not sure if it now offers selectivity/incremental but I have carried on running by swapping out my HD for Casper backup on more than one occasion.

[lvr181]

There are hundreds of options out there. Any of the file sync options mentioned above are good. I would also make an image of at least the C partition of your disk too. You could use Windows' built in imaging do do that, or perhaps something like Macrium Reflect free. Or you could use something like EaseUS backup free to do both file and image backup. Also - though I don't do it myself - I can't help thinking backing up your personal data to the cloud, using something like Crashplan, makes a lot of sense. You have many options..

Forget "cloud" - how are you going to access when site is down or internet not accessible? Use an external hard drive attached to computer to back up data. And are you sure that the cloud provider is safe against hacking?

Actually I wouldn't advocate relying solely on the cloud, nor solely on an HD. I would want cloud + HD, or HD + HD. The former seems better as you then remove the risk of fire/theft/brown-out etc.

Yes the cloud provider might not be safe, but in reality you're MUCH more likely to have your backup HD fail then have your cloud-based backup hacked.

I know what your saying but the external hard drive is to COPY to, so that your files are held not only on the external unit but also your computer. Hardly likely both will fail at same time. And you can copy an image of your o/s to it also. Maybe use the cloud in addition ONLY FOR CRITICALLY IMPORTANT files that contain no personal identification OR financial information. It is a trust thing. Trust yourself not unknown others!

Over time all my family photos have been digitised and placed on DVD's with a copy for each of my daughters plus I keep one also. I have seen too many people lose precious family photos in a fire.

Edited spelling error

Edited June 15, 2014 by lvr181

[cooked]

I looked through most of the programs recommended and on the download sites none of them state how much they can back up before they tell you to get the paid version.

I have used Mozy backup for my files, Google Drive for my fotos as well as an external hard drive.

[lvr181]

The list of advantages of Mac is a long one. I sold both window and Apple computers for four years in a large computer store. How about for starters I have never had use anti virus/malware software on my Macs. There are many reasons sales of Macs are increasing while Windows machines are declining and Apple has become the most valuable company (by far).

Sent from my iPhone using Thaivisa Connect Thailand

A Mac devotee? Windows runs on FAR MORE machines world wide than Macs. Therefore why not "hack" the majority, you are likely to get more results?

Microsoft is a software company, Apple is a hardware company, and that probably leads to a difference in valuations. MS cannot get its software made by cheap labour in Asian countries and then charge a premium price for it. Not everyone can afford to pay over the top price for Macs. Windows desktop sales may be declining in the home computer market but are they in the commercial market? Apple is very good at bringing new technologies to the market but they did not invent/conceive them all. Moses had tablets hehe... And they were featured in the film, 2001 A Space Odyssey. In the mobile market Android systems far outsell Apple world wide. MS missed that market. Lots of "fors and againsts" for both companies.

[shadmo63]

Pehaps someone can clarify: What is a disk "image" if it is not a copy of a hard drive?

BTW i have found Casper to be a very good back up product - not sure if it now offers selectivity/incremental but I have carried on running by swapping out my HD for Casper backup on more than one occasion.

Yes an image is an exact copy of your hard disk (partition) bit by bit. You can break up the hard disk into multiple partitions and keep the backup image on a separate partition. Although it's probably safer to keep it elsewhere (ie another hard drive or DVD). The downside of images is they are very big.

Really the important data you need are multiple copies (x3) of are your personal files. I keep one on the PC, one on a USB stick on my key ring and one in the cloud (Dropbox).

A disk image is used to completely replace a damaged operating system or physical hard disk. It will put your computer back exactly how it was before with every driver, every piece of software and every file restored. Personally I do one image every six months but update personal files weekly. It depends on your usage and how important your data is, what plan you need. Ask yourself - What are the consequences of me losing this file/hard disk/computer? Take into account fire, theft, catastrophic damage and inadvertently deleting an important file. That will help you determine your backup strategy.

[Pib]

I looked through most of the programs recommended and on the download sites none of them state how much they can back up before they tell you to get the paid version.

I have used Mozy backup for my files, Google Drive for my fotos as well as an external hard drive.

Usually it's just some "features" that are not enabled on a free or trial version....or maybe on a trial versions it only stays activated for 30 days. At the AOMEI Backupper website they have an editions comparisons chart...see this webpage.

[hawker9000]

Not a direct answer to your question - lots of credible free product suggestions here - but not knowing the actual nature of your failure...

...Sometimes when a hard disk fails, it's the OS that's trashed rendering the drive unusable as a boot drive, but otherwise readable. Data files may be completely accessible by removing & connecting the drive as a secondary on another PC and then attempting to access the folders containing your data files. "Has worked for me a couple of times over the years.

[NeverSure]

Cobian Backup (if you're using Windows). Free - highly configurable. Saves your stuff in natural or zip/7zip mode. Scheduling. It'll turn your PC off when it's finished. Much more.

http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

+1. It uses the Windows shadow copy service, is very granular in what you can choose to back or ignore, has a scheduler, will save only as many copies as you wish and then deletes the oldest one. It shows your backups in file folders so you can drag and drop just one if that's all you need. Great proggy and free.

Win 7 will do an image of the drive on a schedule. I do both Cobian for the individual files, and the image in case I need to restore a failed disk to where it was the night before, even onto a new disk that's big enough to hold the data.

Win 8 and 8.1 will do the image but has no scheduler. Darn them. I set my Outlook calendar to remind me twice a week.

If you use Windows to make the image, don't forget to made the optical restore disk. Google. Easy.

[taotoo]

The list of advantages of Mac is a long one. I sold both window and Apple computers for four years in a large computer store. How about for starters I have never had use anti virus/malware software on my Macs. There are many reasons sales of Macs are increasing while Windows machines are declining and Apple has become the most valuable company (by far).

Sent from my iPhone using Thaivisa Connect Thailand

That's all irrelevant - the point you made was that backup is set-and-forget on a Mac - well it is on a PC too. The rest of it is off-topic.

[taotoo]

There are hundreds of options out there. Any of the file sync options mentioned above are good. I would also make an image of at least the C partition of your disk too. You could use Windows' built in imaging do do that, or perhaps something like Macrium Reflect free. Or you could use something like EaseUS backup free to do both file and image backup. Also - though I don't do it myself - I can't help thinking backing up your personal data to the cloud, using something like Crashplan, makes a lot of sense. You have many options..

Forget "cloud" - how are you going to access when site is down or internet not accessible? Use an external hard drive attached to computer to back up data. And are you sure that the cloud provider is safe against hacking?

Actually I wouldn't advocate relying solely on the cloud, nor solely on an HD. I would want cloud + HD, or HD + HD. The former seems better as you then remove the risk of fire/theft/brown-out etc.

Yes the cloud provider might not be safe, but in reality you're MUCH more likely to have your backup HD fail then have your cloud-based backup hacked.

I know what your saying but the external hard drive is to COPY to, so that your files are held not only on the external unit but also your computer. Hardly likely both will fail at same time. And you can copy an image of your o/s to it also. Maybe use the cloud in addition ONLY FOR CRITICALLY IMPORTANT files that contain no personal identification OR financial information. It is a trust thing. Trust yourself not unknown others!

Over time all my family photos have been digitised and placed on DVD's with a copy for each of my daughters plus I keep one also. I have seen too many people lose precious family photos in a fire.

Edited spelling error

Yes unlikely that both drives will fail at the same time, but a real-word issue is the backup HD failing silently, or at least silently-enough for the user not to notice.

Personally I wouldn't worry about having financial information etc. in the cloud - it's all encrypted - it's probably more likely my online banking would get hacked.

[macka17]

Hi.

For Backup. Movies\Photo's and Music, I have a coupla BUFFALO 2 and 3 Terra External Hards.

plus an old 350gig which is over 9 yrs old and still plodding.

All 7200 disc speeds. and fairly silent. Used them for over 25 yrs. never had a bad one yet.

Normally just change over at around 10 yr mark and nothing happens (so far)

Best I've ever used for reliability and longevity.

[Cbr150r]

Rococopy, which is a Microsoft utility. Easy to script with too many features to mention.

[lvr181]

Rococopy, which is a Microsoft utility. Easy to script with too many features to mention.

Robocopy - in case someone confused.

[sirchai]

Buy a Mac which comes with time machine. Set it and forget it. Everything works automatically.

That applies equally to Win 8 File History and Win 7 Backup & Restore - no advantage in buying a Mac.

If your hard drive dies, you can't restore anything.

[sustento]

I looked through most of the programs recommended and on the download sites none of them state how much they can back up before they tell you to get the paid version.

Cobian is free. It has no limitations. If you want to make a donation the author will be happy to receive it but it won't make the program work any differently.

[taotoo]

Buy a Mac which comes with time machine. Set it and forget it. Everything works automatically.

That applies equally to Win 8 File History and Win 7 Backup & Restore - no advantage in buying a Mac.

If your hard drive dies, you can't restore anything.

Agreed - see above.

[KonaRain]

Dropbox, Google drive, and Windows One..Skydrive has its own browser for ease of use.

All able to acess anywhere, anytime.Dropboxx is great for emailing files, videos..

All great suggestions above..

And make some dvds for precious stuff.

Windows image is a complete image of drive (s).Takes 20-50 dvds..I use the cloud, three times over for safety.

alohz

[NeverSure]

I mentioned Cobian Backup and Windows Backup image utility with a scheduler in Win 7.

I don't understand all of the concern about a HD failure, unless there's a fire and then backups should be stored off-site. If I'm using a remote HD for my backups, the chances of both HD's failing at once are pretty remote. My backup HD is wireless and "hidden in plain sight."

To be clear, if my primary HD fails, I'll install a new HD, image it from the backup, and be back where I was at 2:00 AM that morning within less than an hour including installing the HD.

[bendejo]

Another vote for Acronis TrueImage here.

Stand-alone bootable from USB pen drive to back up or restore, images mountable with drive letters in Win7 (dunno about Win8).

Personally, I'm no fan of incremental backups in general, the bu usually takes a lot longer to run and the size of the new bu can become ridiculously huge (I haven't tried it with TI in some years), and if you're unlucky the entire bu becomes corrupted and unusable, bad news.

[hawker9000]

Buy a Mac which comes with time machine. Set it and forget it. Everything works automatically.

That applies equally to Win 8 File History and Win 7 Backup & Restore - no advantage in buying a Mac.

If your hard drive dies, you can't restore anything.

Agreed - see above.

This is not necessarily so. A hard drive might just become unbootable - meaning the OS-containing portions of the drive have become damaged & corrupted (probably) - but not be totally unreadable. It's possible data files can be recovered, often by simply connecting the drive to another PC (I'm assuming there's no question of malware infection here...) as a non-boot drive, and seeing what can be read via the file manager. The last time I had a drive failure was in a laptop. After the laptop became totally unbootable, I spent a couple of days of trying to fix it with CHKDSK, some other tools, and a series of sessions trying to do this & that (bad sectors just kept piling up, etc.), I finally gave up and simply removed the drive from the laptop, popped it into a drive enclosure, connected it to my regular desktop PC (as an external drive), and recovered ALL of my data files. I still have this drive, and can still read pretty much all of it but the Windows directories.

I'm not saying this'll be true in every case, but it's certainly worth a try, and might be easier than restoring from a backup. If you think it might be a malware situation however, then of course you don't want to go connecting it to other PCs per the above!

[lostinisaan]

Please use Acronis True Image 2014, the full version with cloning your hard drive. Clone your hard drive and you'll have it back, exactly how it was before including partitions and all files.

I just did that with my dying hard drive of my DELL notebook and had my system back as it was before in about two hours.