Best image/backup software?

[babyshark31]

Hey everyone!

I'm going to be getting a new laptop sometime this summer from my school and I wanted to start backing everything up, finally I know. I'm looking for the best piece of software that I can first off create an image of my OS just the way I like it (programs, settings, etc) that I can revert to if need be and then secondly back up all of my files and what not every week or so incrementally. I'm probably going to be backing it up to an external drive plugged in as USB 2.0.

Anybody have any advice for this? Thanks!

 

[stevecamp09]

Hey everyone!

I'm going to be getting a new laptop sometime this summer from my school and I wanted to start backing everything up, finally I know. I'm looking for the best piece of software that I can first off create an image of my OS just the way I like it (programs, settings, etc) that I can revert to if need be and then secondly back up all of my files and what not every week or so incrementally. I'm probably going to be backing it up to an external drive plugged in as USB 2.0.

Anybody have any advice for this? Thanks!

I've been using Acronis True Image, works very well. I understand win7 has a fairly basic native backup tool and plenty of people have good things to say about but i've personally never tried it.

 

[babyshark31]

I've been using Acronis True Image, works very well. I understand win7 has a fairly basic native backup tool and plenty of people have good things to say about but i've personally never tried it.

I'm guessing you can setup schedules for it? Does the laptop has a RAID array? The laptop I'm getting is supposed to have a RAID (0 i think) array in it.

Thanks

 

[stevecamp09]

I'm guessing you can setup schedules for it? Does the laptop has a RAID array? The laptop I'm getting is supposed to have a RAID (0 i think) array in it.

Thanks

Yes, it is a fully featured app, allows for incremental (default mode), differential etc on pretty much any kind of schedule you like. Also allows you to create a full system image or you can get more granular with specific files and folders if you want that. Happy with the product so far, was not too expensive either. There are probably some people on here who can chime in with cheaper or even free products which are maybe as good though. As for RAID0, couldn't be more important for you to get a quality backup schedule going so i'd make this a priority once you get your new laptop.

 

[babyshark31]

Couldn't agree more about finding a good backup solution for RAID. I remember reading somewhere that some programs have problems with raid arrays, which is why I was wondering about Acronis. Anybody have any experience with backing up raid 0?

Also, how big of a hard drive am i going to need if my hard drive is 400GB? I'm assuming the incremental backups will eventually exceed 400GB

 

[ToddW2]

It won't if you have it delete destination file if deleted from source.

Personally I use SmartSync Pro which is very similar to the above, and another one I was trying was Second Copy which is a free trial.

Incremental is nice, but I also like to do weekly zip backups, and for `real` active syncing I use dropbox.

 

[Impulse]

First off, do yourself a favor and partition the drive in two so you can exclude your docs from your image backups (thus vastly reducing their size)... A lot of laptops already come w/their drive partitioned for this purpose but the Documents, Pictures, etc. folders are usually still on C:/, just move 'em over to D:/ or w/e and Windows will give you the option to move anything already in them (it'll re-map the default locations and everything will keep working as if they were the original locations).

Win7's OS imaging tool is actually pretty strong, much better than the previous versions... I haven't used the file backup tool tho. I still use Norton Ghost because it's always been reliable for me and it has a couple of extra perks... You can create backups of a system w/o even installing it (w/the latest version, or older versions pre-10.0), it can also re-size partitions while maintaining alignment which is important w/SSD... It's scheduling and backup maintenance features are strong, you can tell it to delete the oldest and how many to keep, you can do incremental vs full backups, etc.

If you want something free, DriveImage XML is pretty solid, I've used it in the past as well... Tho as I said, Win7's own tool is pretty solid too. Image backups are usually compressed by about a factor of 50% btw... So if you're only using say, 60GB on your OS & apps partition (here's where keeping your docs separate pays off), then a single backup of that would be 30GB... Meaning you can keep a few full backups (this week's, last week's, etc.) w/o wasting a lot of space. If you use incremental backups you take even better advantage of the space available (tho restoring can be more of a chore, and they'll pile up in the long run).

I use Ghost to create backup images of my OS drive (my SSD) to my external 500GB (on e-SATA) and do occasional backups of my docs drive (the 640GB HDD), but for my docs/pics/music I mostly keep them sync'd to the external as 1:1 copies (scheduled to run daily)... Makes it easier to go and retrieve one if I accidentally deleted, overwrote, or modified a personal file. If you use an image backup tool or any sort of program that backups documents to a compressed combined file then you have to load it up to open or mount said file and retrieve your doc. To do simple 1:1 syncs I'd recommend MS SyncToy or BrightSparks SyncBack...

Or even Dropbox (or Windows Live Mesh) if you have a smaller sub-set of docs (2-5GB) that you wanna sync between various systems and have accessible in the cloud (and/or your phone, and/or w/the ability to make them public on the web).

Hope that helps... Everyone should have their own backup routine, no one plan is gonna be perfect for everyone so just adapt as necessary.