Backup -Image or Normal Backup

[chris ashdown]

Looking at getting a portable hard drive for backups

Not clear on the IMAGE options offered on backing up, so looking for a bit of advice

What method of backup is quickest?

What one uses least disk space?

For image which I think copies all the disk rather than just the data need the same size disk as original and if so could you put say two images or more onto a very large disk (at present only using 58gig of hard drive)

[gabrielcrowe]

most of the disc imaging software i'v encountered, actually has compressions, and strong compression at that, your iamges will msot likely take up a lot less space than they need to.

[chris ashdown]

We have Acronis

[pinbrook]

whilst deciding on which method to use, you should also consider how you would want to be able to restore.

I don't use imaging so can not comment on this

My preference is to create a backup set - ie I choose which files to backup and how many archived copies to keep so I then get hold of any file i wish to restore very quickly.

Disk space is cheap nowadays so compression is not an issue for me, and if you backup overnight speed and network conjestion is not an issue either. But I am talking about backing up in a webdesign environment and not a fully fledged online shopping environment.

[Duncan Rounding]

We use Acronis and schedule a full backup each week and daily differentials. The differential is quite large but you can then restore with just the full backup and the required daily differential, otherwise with incremental backups you need each in the series plus your full backup.

The drawback is that the differentials are quite large up to about 6 Gb each after a week (the c drive is about 80Gb used - lots of the differential backups are photoshop files, actinic snapshots and outlook psts), but with large HD it's not much of an issue.

[GAViN™©]

if your wanting to do just a mirror copy of all files then which I do at home from my internal HDD to my external HDD i use Synch Toy from Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...9-CCE41AF06EB7

It might do what you want - worth a look anyway

or you could simply use ntbackup on XP and write a small batch file that will automatically start the backup for you, and use the windows scheduler to schedule backups as and when you want them.

[chris ashdown]

Just brought a fantastic bargain in a Iomega 320 gb USB hard drive from Staples for under £50

Going the hole hard drive backup (image) route as basically I thought that if I continued just backing up data files, How long and how frustrated, would I be if the worst happened; and I had to find and re-install all the programs etc and how long would my customers wait as i had to re-install everything and remember all the little things

[NormanRouxel]

I've been a Norton Ghost user for years.

However the mention of Acronis on this thread made me go and download the 15 day trial of True Image 11 Home. Now I can see why PC-Pro have A-listed it.

It can do a full backup of my C drive (42Gb in use) onto an USB2 external drive in 35 minutes or so (and does this while the PC carries on its usual work).

In order to test the recovery situation, I burned a recovery CD and booted from that. Up came a full GUI system (looks like Linux hiding under the GUI) that has full access to USB disks and flash drives as well as the LAN. Nice.

Looks like I'll be switching to Acronis soon.

[intrapreneur]

Consider this!

Well don't get a Freecom 500GB Network Drive (USB/LAN)! I did and have had no end of trouble. I cannot get it to work on the LAN so have attached via USB to my own PC. It gets too hot, disappears, re-appears, can't cope with multiple file copy - just a nightmare!

With lot's of hindsight I should have simply added a large internal hard drive and shared it across the network - I know it's not portable but you can always write to a DVD.

[Cheapprices4u]

aldi have a 500gb on offer
about 69quid i think

[fleetwood]

PC Pro have been extolling the wonders of Acronis True Image for ages.

Was about to purchase the home 11 version, but then discovered there is a workstation version (albeit, only available by 48 hour download, rather than a retail boxed ed).

I had assumed that a disk image would restore on any machine, which is what you want if your PC either goes belly up, or worse still, is stolen.

Workstation includes restore to an alternative hardware setup as an additional feature, whereas home ed appears not to. You then also need 'Universal Restore Workstation' (another £17), to restore the image back to another machine.
So with the home ed, I assume you can only restore to the same machine the image came from, and if that goes, or you upgrade your hardware, the image is useless.

Is anyone able to confirm this, and has anyone used the workstation version?

[hb1]

Mounting Image

The Acronis Image Can be Mounted on another PC - assuming you also have Acrnis installed... you can also restore individual files/directories by booting to the rescue media.

Having said that Universal Restore really works very well.

[Mark H]

I've been looking at NTI Shadow - this automatically and constantly "mirrors" your data (not system) to an external disk, so that the disk is always up to date. Files are in native format, not an image, so the disk can be moved to any other PC and used as normal. Interestingly, it is now included with Freecom's Toughdrive Pro, which I have a lot of time for, and has replaced Acronis TrueImage in this bundle. I haven't jumped yet - anyone got any experience of it?

[chris ashdown]

This is getting me worried now

I have Acronis and make a backup daily to a USB backup disk and also have a USB stick with the Acronis backup utility on it

I understood but have not tested it yet that if my Hard disk went down I could either plug in the USB stick to either a new hard disk or new PC and then restore my information and have a duplicate setup to when I last restored as long as the new hard drive is as big or bigger than the old one

Please tell me I'm OK as you have me worried now

[Duncan Rounding]

All image type backups are dependant on hardware so it would defintely restore to another harddrive in the same pc but it might not restore onto another pc with different hardware - due to windows drivers. You may however still be able to restore by rebooting a number of times to let windows discover your new hardware or at least boot into safe mode.

That said you will be able to load Acronis onto another pc and then be able to pull any files out of an existing backup. Remember that if you do incremental or differential backups then you will need previous backups as well in order to restore all your data.

IMO it is best to do a full backup once a week and then daily differential backups, then to restore you would need that weeks full backup plus only the last days differential backup. If on the other hand you choose incremental backups then you would need the full backup plus potentially all the other incremental backups since to restore. The only advantage of incremental backups over differential backups is the saving of disk space, and that's cheap enough these days.

My weekly full backups and daily incrementals are scheduled to run automatically each night at 1am and are stored on an additional internal drive, an email is sent to myself to confirm it was successful. I also copy off my weeks backups to another external drive for at least 2 months.

All this is in addition to my normal working backups of client work in progress which I archive monthly to DVD as well as well keep offisite on a hosted server.

Twice I have been in the unfortunate situation of having to recover data and can safely say it restored very easily and quickly - hence my belt and braces approach.

It's always good to test you regime (even if on another machine) and write down the simple steps you needed to do to be able to restore.