Your backup solution

I'm not too happy with my current backup solution, so I'd like to hear what everybody here uses to backup their system.

 

Separate system (OS+Apps) and data partitions.
Images of system partition in "immediately post-install" and "set up and tweaked to my liking" states.
Data partition robocopied to two external HDs.
Online backup of the most important static/non-changing data (actively limited by my mediocre internet connection, with a better pipe I could see this becoming more important).
Everything is encrypted.

Other than the system partition image, I've never actually needed any of these since I got serious about backups after my "Deathstar" experience.

 

At the moment I just copy stuff to external drives...

However, from a fellow member and what I've seen online, Windows Home Server (or any similar system) is possibly pretty close to an ideal backup solution.

 

I just backup to an external drive (daily), and once a week, do a complete PC backup with Vista Ultimate' built-in complete PC backup utility.

 

Windows Home Server

everyone should try it, and everyone will drop and forget all their other solutions.

it's amazing how unknown it still is (shown as it isn't an option to chose here).

it should be the top of the list, as it's the primary way to do this in a more-than-one pc environment (which most are.. at least if you don't live alone)

 

I have an image of my C: drive in an external hard drive after tweaking. Its a bit out of date though.....so I might end up just doing a clean restart in case something messes up that badly....

 

I backup to my other computer through hooked up network drive.

 

I have a partition for Windows, a partition for Media (stuff under my profile folder in Windows), and a partition for work. I make manual copies of the Media and Work partitions regularly onto my 1 TB external HDD. The only thing I lose with a full restore are installed programs.

 

Right now I backup to an external drive, but I plan on setting up a file server with Server 2008 in the next few months to manage backups.

 

proper care for my machines

 

Images for OS, programs and settings (just an updated clean install with about 10 programs) and an external HDD for other data; music, movies etc.

 

I use Macrium Reflect Free Edition to do drive images. The free edition doesn't handle incremental backups, but it works nicely anyway. I backup about once every week or two, depending on how much new stuff or changes have been made.

 

What imaging software do you use?

 

What makes me angry, is that on Windows it is nearly impossible to find software that will simply image your drive as is and make it bootable on an external drive. My father uses OSX and has SuperDuper! which copies everything as is and makes the disk bootable, and it also does incremental back ups. On Windows, finding a piece of software that does that without compressing it into .rar/.zip files or into a proprietary file format is next to impossible.

 

cobian backup

 

If anything, WHS had an even worse launch than Vista did - even the mainstream press picked up on the drive corruption fiasco, which is not exactly confidence-inspiring for an OS designed with backing up data in mind. The issues may have long been fixed, but like Vista, the bad press lives on and it's probably a major reason why it's never taken off.

It's probably Microsoft's fault. Booting Windows off an external drive can be done, but it's far from easy, even with a clean install tailored for a USB drive so I'd imagine it'd be downright near impossible to expect anything to work on a used system.

Also, there's little demand for such a feature right now, so I don't see how a company like Acronis could justify spending development dollars on making it work.

 

I notice that Windows 7 has built in imaging backup software but I have not tried it or heard anyone mention it. My current backup solution consists of a bootable BartPE CD/DVD that has a copy of Drive Snapshot on it. I image my entire system to an external USB 500GB 2.5 7200 RPM laptop hard disk that has been installed inside of a caddy.

Drive Snapshot is similar to Acronis but without the bloat and it does not need to be installed, it can be run stand-alone.

 

Good idea, this poll.

I personally keep my data fairly current on my desktop, laptop, and external drive simultaneously. I figure the odds of all three crashing at once are favorable enough for me.

NB: I don't put *everything* on my laptop, since it doesn't have that much space to begin with. I have a few items that take up a good amount of space, but aren't particularly irreplaceable or invaluable, that I keep only on my desktop and external.

 

I simply do an external backup right now, but will soon be using imaging software.

How is Drive Snapshot? I've heard so many bad things about imaging software and how much of a hassle they are. Also, does it backup applications (as in no need to reinstall them)?

 

Drive Snapshot is excellent, it is not as user friendly as Acronis and has no flashy GUI but it is great once you are familiar with it. It is no hassle at all, it backs up to a compressed image at about 1GB per minute and when you restore, you do not have to reinstall anything since it is an exact copy of everything that was on your system down to the very last byte (apart from excluded files, pagefile etc).

I have also used it after I purchased new hard disks on my laptop. So I restore an image to the new hard disk and then boot up as opposed to reinstalling everything from scratch.

The only hassle with Drive Snapshot is that it does not have its own bootable recovery CD software but Acronis does. Once you have created a Bart PE or other bootable CD then you are set. I have restored hundreds of images that I have created while windows had been running as well as ones via bootable CD while windows was not running and all have worked perfectly. Incremental / Differential images also work fine but you might as well do full backups after a full defragment since it changes so many bytes.

 

I've been using built in Windows 7 image backups that made it easy to restore in a snap after a HDD failure, but I set up a WHS a week ago and it does nightly backups, wakes a computer out of sleep to do it, and looks like it should be a snap to restore with the restore CD. Can someone with a WHS tell me how the restore process works, since it doesn't appear as though they are image based...

 

EDIT: Nevermind, I found the answer . Thanks for the thorough response!

 

yes, restore process goes like this:

usb stick or cd to boot from into pc/laptop.
start up and connect to home server (more details below)
select your system, select the backup, restore.


now to connect to the server, the system has to be able to go on the network, and it may fail to do that due to the lack of a fitting network driver. in these cases, you can open the last recent backup of your failed system from another pc. in this open virtual disk, you'll find an additional folder "drivers for whs restore". copy those onto a usb stick (great if it's the one you booted the restore from ), and you can boot with your restore stick/disk, load the drivers from the stick (one click), and continue with the restore.

i hope whs2 will have an option to put in a usb stick into the whs all the time, and it gets automatically feed with the boot data + the drivers that your systems use.

so if you have special network drivers, it may have some extra step involved.

oh, and if you have more than one partition, you can chose which partition where. but since home server (and all systems with ssd), partitions make no sense for me anymore. \\server is the "big data partition", the rest is all on c: