Questions on how to do Smart Backups in Windows

1. Do folks here recommend just backing up select files, or the whole system drive? It seems logical to backup the my music, my pictures, my docs, etc. That would include things like MS Office docs. And not backup programs and games.
2. Do people here prefer online backup solutions, or onsite. For the latter, example is a USB hard drive.
3. If onsite is a good way to backup files, is it better to use a USB hard drive vs a secondary drive inside the PC or laptop?
4. Is the built-in Windows backup option good enough? Or do people here recommend a third party software solution?

Personal practice follows:

1) I do both. I have three active internal drives - a 1TB system SSD and two 4TB data SSDs. They all get backed up locally to two 8TB internal backup drives using Shadow Protect SPX backup software. It's set up to do full backups of each drive every two weeks and incrementals every day. It's also set up to automatically keep 2 sets of full and incremental backups for each drive at any given time. The older of the two sets gets replaced automatically whenever a new full backup is run. This means I can go back in time between two to four weeks to restore the state of individual files or complete drives within that period. I also backup only select files using Backblaze cloud backup. More on this in 2)

2) I use both cloud and onsite to provide comprehensive protection. Onsite provides protection from drive failures since I have complete drive images locally that can quickly replicate a lost drive. I'm not aware of consumer cloud services that can do this since they try to minimize their storage and bandwidth costs by not backing up program and system files. Also, it's not practical to restore data from the cloud for a large failed drive over the internet. Cloud services will generally mail your data to you on a hard drive in such circumstances, but you have to pay for the service on top of the subscription.

However, the cloud provides protection in one area that onsite backups can't, which is the total loss of a PC including backup drives. While floods and fires are examples of such risk, I've read of others losing PC's and backups to water damage from an overflowing tub or coolant leakage in a water cooled desktop etc. Shit happens.

Backblaze also provides near real-time incremental backups to backstop the fact that my local incremental backups are only once a day. Between the two, there should be low risk of any data being lost in a drive failure. I could do more frequent incrementals with ShadowProtect, but there are potential performance problems that require some detail to describe. I can elaborate if you're interested.

3) As stated before, I use internal backup drives for local backups and steer clear of external USB or networked drives. That's because the latter are too slow to the point that they affect PC performance for long periods of time. It takes six hours to do a full backup of one of my 4TB SSDs to an 8TB HDD over SATA connections. I can't imagine how many hours it would take to do it over USB or ethernet. Since my desktop is a gaming PC, I don't want extended periods of time where a backup is chewing up significant resources.

4) No. My direct experience is with Windows 7 Backup and Restore which remains part of Win 10 Pro. My biggest issue that it will not automatically delete old backups and fails the backup when it runs out of space on the destination drive. If you're backing up a large drive, it means that the automatic scheduling of backups doesn't actually work since old backups have to be manually deleted. That's why I'm willing to pay for ShadowProtect since it automates the removal of the oldest backup before starting a new one.

Win 10 brings a new backup app called File History that I have yet to use. It appears to be a utility that can only back up pre selected folders and files. It apparently can manage backup drive space but doesn't appear to be able to do volume backups and you can only have one backup drive. That doesn't work for me.

biggles said:

1. Do folks here recommend just backing up select files, or the whole system drive? It seems logical to backup the my music, my pictures, my docs, etc. That would include things like MS Office docs. And not backup programs and games.
2. Do people here prefer online backup solutions, or onsite. For the latter, example is a USB hard drive.
3. If onsite is a good way to backup files, is it better to use a USB hard drive vs a secondary drive inside the PC or laptop?
4. Is the built-in Windows backup option good enough? Or do people here recommend a third party software solution?

Click to expand...

1. Both. Use a syncing tool (preferably with versioning) to mirror your folders to another device with a normal filesystem. (You don't want to fuss with a proprietary file format when you need to get back online. Just hook up to another PC & read your data.) These backups will run quickly, so do them often. Images can be a few times per year.
2. I insist on having non-cloud backups, but that doesn't have to mean always on-site. Cloud backups offer an extra layer of protection, but they're difficult for large amounts of data over slower internet connections. And you can't be 100% sure the cloud will be there when you need your data NOW.
3. USB3. USB2 is too slow. Internal backups are too easy to lose with ransomware or PSU failure, and recovering to another PC is much easier with external.
4. I prefer aftermarket. Win7's backup is semi-deprecated. File History makes a mess of versions. Personally, I've used FreeFileSync (which works well but has some downsides), Acronis & Macrium for a while. Macrium Free is a good choice to start.

If you have a few PCs to protect or a little spending money, I strongly recommend a NAS with ZFS or BTRFS on at least 2 HDs. This will let you stay online after an HD failure with recovery of multiple, read-only Previous Versions right in Windows Explorer. A $200ish Synology NAS offers this, and their Hyper Backup app can version everything to USB (though in a proprietary archive format). That checks off a lot of important boxes with minimal expense & learning curve.

Do you see the common thread here? You want to be confident that you can recover your data reliably & easily when things go horribly wrong. Do not put all your eggs in one basket.

I have at least 4 permanent external hard drives and I find that only 4 of these creates a logistical wiring and storage nightmare in my work area. They also seem more prone to issues than internal drives to me. The proprietary connectors and interfaces on the enclosures seem to go bad before the drive itself would.

FreeFileSync is a powerful utility, it's worth checking out. I use it to sync my primary external hard drives to my backup external hard drives. (If you want a new 8TB external, you have to buy 2).

It's entirely situational - all of your questions. Except #4 - Windows Backup is crap in my opinion.

1.) For my systems, most all of them are specific files only. If I need full system backups, I just virtualize those systems (and then just back up the VMDK)

2.) I prefer on-site because it's faster and I generally work/live in places with crap ISPs. I also don't have to worry about connectivity. But I can see a good case for online backups in a lot of cases as well.

3.) The real question here: online backups (as on, actually turned on/plugged in) versus offline backups (hard drive disconnected in a drawer). If you have your device offline and unplugged, it's much less likely to get damaged, hacked, corrupted, accidently deleted, or anything else that can happen to these things. But, you have to go plug it in when you are ready to access it. Depends on what you need.

4.) Windows I just Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V files that I want to back up, I haven't found a good automated system that I like yet for Windows. OS X I use Time Machine. Linux I use rsync.

I'm a big fan of a local NAS myself, and that's what I use for my own computers. Our work server we have a NAS for on-site backups that stays online, and we also do a monthly offline copy to spare drives which are kept off site (in case the building burns down or something), and we have dabbled with online AWS backups as well, but didn't stick with them because we didn't see enough benefit (and there was some question of data protection/privacy on a system you don't have direct control over).

biggles said:

1. Do folks here recommend just backing up select files, or the whole system drive? It seems logical to backup the my music, my pictures, my docs, etc. That would include things like MS Office docs. And not backup programs and games.
2. Do people here prefer online backup solutions, or onsite. For the latter, example is a USB hard drive.
3. If onsite is a good way to backup files, is it better to use a USB hard drive vs a secondary drive inside the PC or laptop?
4. Is the built-in Windows backup option good enough? Or do people here recommend a third party software solution?

Click to expand...

I use EZgig to copy our OS drive. Once a month seems to be enough. For data files I use a batch file and XCopy and PKZip each with a long string of parameters to backup our data.

USB3 and 100Mbps are fast enough that internal or external is not important. I do an automatic backup to internal removable drives on our server each night. I do a manual backup to an external drive from my notebook.

But the most important criteria is making choices that you will actually get your job done.