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Thread: Software for backing up data automatically |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 6
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wcgridmember
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Mar 30, 2005 Post Count: 112 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I recently lost access to a hard drive with 'tons' of precious data.
To avoid repeating this experience, I am looking for an app for backing it up automatically (so that the data is at least in two places). I am using Windows 10. Do you have experience with such an app that you recommend? Thank you for your time! |
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ca05065
Senior Cruncher Joined: Dec 4, 2007 Post Count: 328 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I use the free version of Macrium Reflect to image the disk. This allows for full disk restore, partition restore or mounting the backup as a file system and choosing individual folders or files.
----------------------------------------I have scheduled a full backup weekly with a differential backup for the other days of the week. If any backup is missed then it will happen on next restart. The circumstances where the above system could fail is a fire or ransom malware which could encrypt my hard drive and any external hard drive. I try to overcome this by also taking separate full backups occasionally and removing the drive to a safe location. [Edit 1 times, last edit by ca05065 at Nov 14, 2016 12:16:56 AM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I use and recommend Crashplan, it's the simplest one I know of. The free version does daily backup to a local machine or disk, the paid versions open for cloud backup.
There are also some backup tools built into Windows 10, here's an overview: http://www.howtogeek.com/220986/how-to-use-al...ackup-and-recovery-tools/ The tools built into Windows 10 are perfectly adequate. I just prefer Crashplan because it makes it easier to backup several computers and different OS'es to the same location. |
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ngsmith
Cruncher Joined: Jul 21, 2005 Post Count: 48 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Another Crashplan subscriber. I backup my desktop to the crashplan cloud as a paid service, and backup a neighbor's laptop to my desktop as a freebie. When her laptop HDD failed, it was a simple process to replace the HDD with a SSD, rebuild Win10 from ISO and restore the My Documents stuff.
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Byteball_730a2960
Senior Cruncher Joined: Oct 29, 2010 Post Count: 318 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Great topic. I was actually looking into this.
Crashplan looks great. If I am reading things right, I think my plan would work with this. For those of you who use it, would the free version do this easily? I don't want to do disk images, just back up what work I have on my desktops and maybe the odd selected folder. I would like to back everything to 2 different drives, but not the cloud Laptop 1 - Win 10, backup daily Laptop 2 - Win 10, backup daily Desktop 1 - Win 7, backup daily Desktop 2- Win 7, backup daily. External drive used as one of the backup drives Desktop 3 - Linux mint. Dedicated cruncher, but add 2nd internal drive to use as one of the backup drives Would that work? I noticed in the free version, multiple backup sets was excluded. Would that fall under that? Or could I use a second free backup program to clone/backup desktop 2's external drive on desktop 3? |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I learned an important lesson regarding the Windows 7/8/10 "Backup and Restore" application when I had to restore a Win7-64 desktop PC from an image I'd made using the application.
The scenario: I have a "RAID tower" (a 4TB hardware-based-RAID 10 enclosure) that supports both eSATA and USB connections. I backed up the first PC to it, then a second, and, later, a third. Each of these was done as a local/direct connection. However, when I tried to restore the original image of the first PC, the only backup/image recognized by the application was the most recent, for the third machine. I was able to use a trial version of Acronis True Image to recover/restore the image of the earlier machine, but lesson learned. Instead, I now use a network connection to backup to the device, even if it is plugged into the machine locally. This allows me to specify the folder to which the backup/image should be saved, which keeps the set for each machine individually available. For example, for machine called PCABC1, and with the RAID tower directly connected to that machine, instead of backing up to H:, I backup to the folder \\pcabc1\h$\BackupTarget\PCABC1. I have a subfolder for each such PC in the root folder called BackupTarget. This is the only gotcha that I've encountered in using the Backup and Restore application in Win7/8/10. |
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