Disc-bootable backup software

[Cyber Akuma]

Ok, just to be sure I didn't fail Backups 101: From my understanding if I have a set of incremental backups I can restore from any point an incremental backup was made, not only from the latest incremental correct? And a set of incremental backups after a few months or years of backups will actually take up more space than a full because they will contain deleted data that wouldn't be present if you did a full correct?

Assuming that is true and I didn't fail on the basic fundamentals of backups.... I am trying to find out what options there are for doing backups off of a boot disk to an external drive (most likely USB). Thing is, there are a few requirements I need it to be capable of:

1: This will be a windows system, and most of those backup bootdisks are Linux based, which depending on the distro tend to have good to glitchy NTFS support last time I used them, especially NTFS write support. Dunno if that's gotten any better nowadays.

2. I want to backup the entire OS drive, not just a partition, but the boot sector and MBR itself. Well... most likely I will stick with MBR, but just in case, can any handle GPT as well?

3. Pretty sure 99.99% of backup apps do this, but just tossing it out there, it would be preferable if it would compress the backup image too. Speed of backup/restore isn't an issue here, just reliability..... and not taking up terrabytes to backup gigabytes.

4 Not sure how possible this is, especially on a drive-level rather than partition level backup, but it would be nice if it would ignore the page and hibernate file, since those would be huge, change all the time and thus set off the incremental backup, and and have zero reason whatsoever to be backed up.

5. The system will have two SSDs in RAID0, will backup programs have an issue with this? (There will also be a RAID5 but those are just storage and don't need to be backed up over a bootdisk. Also, I would only need the latest version of the data on the RAID5 backup, no need to go back to any certain earlier points).

I used to use Acronis a few years ago, but from my understanding their latest version of the software is terrible. Are there any good free or paid offerings that will let me do all this?

 

[PTNL]

Ok, just to be sure I didn't fail Backups 101: From my understanding if I have a set of incremental backups I can restore from any point an incremental backup was made, not only from the latest incremental correct? And a set of incremental backups after a few months or years of backups will actually take up more space than a full because they will contain deleted data that wouldn't be present if you did a full correct?

You're mixing and/or mis-interpreting an incremental backup and a differential backup.

1: This will be a windows system, and most of those backup bootdisks are Linux based, which depending on the distro tend to have good to glitchy NTFS support last time I used them, especially NTFS write support. Dunno if that's gotten any better nowadays.

Better, yes. Whether or not it has improved enough to be a candidate in your eyes is another story.

2. I want to backup the entire OS drive, not just a partition, but the boot sector and MBR itself. Well... most likely I will stick with MBR, but just in case, can any handle GPT as well?

GPT support has been added for many backup utilities, but hasn't been added at the same time across the board. Read the specifics on the latest version of any candidate, and skim the revision history if nothing stands out.

3. Pretty sure 99.99% of backup apps do this, but just tossing it out there, it would be preferable if it would compress the backup image too. Speed of backup/restore isn't an issue here, just reliability..... and not taking up terrabytes to backup gigabytes.

4 Not sure how possible this is, especially on a drive-level rather than partition level backup, but it would be nice if it would ignore the page and hibernate file, since those would be huge, change all the time and thus set off the incremental backup, and and have zero reason whatsoever to be backed up.

Any files you can see from Windows Explorer (once you turn off hiding of important files) will be backed up by the utility. If you desire absolute bit-for-bit backup, you can do that as well -- but your backups will balloon in size, even if compression is enabled. Part of #4 relates to my earlier comment about incremental vs differential.

5. The system will have two SSDs in RAID0, will backup programs have an issue with this? (There will also be a RAID5 but those are just storage and don't need to be backed up over a bootdisk. Also, I would only need the latest version of the data on the RAID5 backup, no need to go back to any certain earlier points).

This is a YMMV question, as no vendor supports every controller out there. You need to test this.

I used to use Acronis a few years ago, but from my understanding their latest version of the software is terrible. Are there any good free or paid offerings that will let me do all this?

I can only speak for the last few major version changes (ie: yearly version changes), and Acronis has been quite solid.

 

[Cyber Akuma]

You're mixing and/or mis-interpreting an incremental backup and a differential backup.

From my understanding, a differential backup records the changes since the last full backup, and an incremental from the last incremental backup, and for incremental you need the full and every incremental backup made since to do the restore while on a differential you only need the differential and full.

What I want to know is, say I have 6 sets of incremental backups made over a few months.

Full-1-2-3-4-5

If I wanted to, could I restore from point 3 or point 4? Or do I have to restore from point 5? (And yes, I realize that means it would need point # and all the points before it as well as the full in order to do it).

I am going to have a 512gb drive to hold my os, software, and games. And I want to able to basically restore to a previous point if I ever need to. Namely, I want to at the very least have a point where Windows and it's drivers are installed, then a point where I installed and configured all my software, then any point after that.

Also.... what would my options be if I run out of space? Would I have any way of combining several incremental into one, thus losing the ability to restore to any point in between but saving the space of any deleted files they had backed up?

 

[PTNL]

From my understanding, a differential backup records the changes since the last full backup, and an incremental from the last incremental backup, and for incremental you need the full and every incremental backup made since to do the restore while on a differential you only need the differential and full.

What I want to know is, say I have 6 sets of incremental backups made over a few months.

Full-1-2-3-4-5

If I wanted to, could I restore from point 3 or point 4? Or do I have to restore from point 5? (And yes, I realize that means it would need point # and all the points before it as well as the full in order to do it).

I am going to have a 512gb drive to hold my os, software, and games. And I want to able to basically restore to a previous point if I ever need to. Namely, I want to at the very least have a point where Windows and it's drivers are installed, then a point where I installed and configured all my software, then any point after that.

This sounds like full+differential is enough for you with only 1-2 runs of the recovery software to restore to a particular point (full, or full + differential).

However... There's a few aspects about this thread that is confusing:
1 - If backups are so important, then why isn't uptime equally as important to you? (I'm questioning the RAID-0 decision, as opposed to RAID-1.)
2 - The price point of SSDs (and mechanical drives) do not seem to be an issue; so why the stress over different backup strategies in regards to storage capacity? If you're only interested in the last one or two full backups and some differentials, then you'll be fine with 2-3 TB of storage.

 

[Cyber Akuma]

This sounds like full+differential is enough for you with only 1-2 runs of the recovery software to restore to a particular point (full, or full + differential).

Those two restore points I mentioned are ones I definitely want to have, but I also want to be able to restore to the latest state of the drive I backed up as well, the ability to be able to restore to previous states by using incremental is just a bonus as long as its not a large drain on space to have months or years of incremental as opposed to using one differential.

1 - If backups are so important, then why isn't uptime equally as important to you? (I'm questioning the RAID-0 decision, as opposed to RAID-1.)

The RAID0 is for performance, I don't really plan to have anything important on it (about the only irrecoverable data on it would be settings and savedata, my documents likely will not be stored on there, even though the "My Documents" user folder will be).

The backup is more about convinence so I don't need to re-install the OS, all my drivers, software, and re-configure everything.

Its a home desktop, and not a server, so uptime is not important, keeping the data safe is.

I also will have a RAID5 in the system, that one the data WILL be important on, but I plan to have nothing that is a system or user folder on that array for the sake of being able to take it offline if need be without disabling or crippling the rest of the system itself. Since there is no need to access that drive from a boot disk to backup the data on it as there will be no system files, it should be far easier to use Windows software to back that array up. It will mostly house large amounts of personal files (photos, home videos, etc) as well as backups of disk images.

2 - The price point of SSDs (and mechanical drives) do not seem to be an issue; so why the stress over different backup strategies in regards to storage capacity? If you're only interested in the last one or two full backups and some differentials, then you'll be fine with 2-3 TB of storage.

Its more a question of how much larger the backup will become. If its a few GB more that is easily tolerable, but if we are talking a year-long set of incrementals taking several hundred gigs more of space than a single full would.... that's going to be a problem.

I want those first two restore points, and a "latest" point at the minimum, but being able to restore to any point would be a nice bonus depending on how much extra space that would take.

I should be able to get away with this using only a 2 or 3TB external at first, but I am not sure how unless I can massively compress the data I am going to fully backup that RAID5 array once it starts getting full..... unless by then a single drive is as large as the entire array.... I can't exactly afford a tape drive.

P.S. I used to favor Acronis software years ago, and I was looking up the latest version (2013) and it seemed to get bad reviews everywhere, which is why I am asking this. However, everyone is still recommending it.... but I have no idea if this is form past experiences or about the latest version. I know older versions were good, but I am not so sure about 2013. Can you even buy the older versions anymore?

 

[jordan12]

The 2013 Acronis is horrid. Completely ignore it.


I use active disk image myself and it works well.

http://disk-image.com/

 

[PTNL]

The RAID0 is for performance, I don't really plan to have anything important on it (about the only irrecoverable data on it would be settings and savedata, my documents likely will not be stored on there, even though the "My Documents" user folder will be).

The backup is more about convinence so I don't need to re-install the OS, all my drivers, software, and re-configure everything.

Its a home desktop, and not a server, so uptime is not important, keeping the data safe is.

The trade-off with a better uptime configuration is lower odds of having downtime to restore backup sets.

What are you doing that requires (a currently unqualified) kind of performance?

I used to favor Acronis software years ago, and I was looking up the latest version (2013) and it seemed to get bad reviews everywhere, which is why I am asking this.

What reviews?

 

[Cyber Akuma]

The trade-off with a better uptime configuration is lower odds of having downtime to restore backup sets.

What are you doing that requires (a currently unqualified) kind of performance?

Again, uptime and downtime is not important, this is a home PC, not a server. And worst comes to worst I have other computers I can use as backup.

I simply wanted the OS/App drive to have the highest performance I could configure it to have.

What reviews?

Professional sites like neowin or cnet mention issues with features and crashing, and its getting utterly slammed in user reviews. Seems people dislike versions after 2010, especially 12 and 13.

 

[PTNL]

I simply wanted the OS/App drive to have the highest performance I could configure it to have.

Depending on the drives and controller/mobo, you may be hampering performance by sacrificing TRIM support for RAID-0.

Professional sites like neowin or cnet mention issues with features and crashing, and its getting utterly slammed in user reviews. Seems people dislike versions after 2010, especially 12 and 13.

The "professionalism" point aside... I've used all of those versions, and across a variety of consumer- and server-grade hardware without issue. My suggestion is to test it out on your own; if you don't like it or it has compatibility issues with your hardware, then move on to something else.

 

[Cyber Akuma]

Depending on the drives and controller/mobo, you may be hampering performance by sacrificing TRIM support for RAID-0.

Oh, that was one of the first things I checked to make sure the motherboard supported when choosing it, it supports TRIM over RAID0. Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe.

The drives are Samsung 830, 256GB.

On top of that I need the space two of them would provide anyway, and they were cheaper than a single 512GB Samsung 830.

The "professionalism" point aside... I've used all of those versions, and across a variety of consumer- and server-grade hardware without issue. My suggestion is to test it out on your own; if you don't like it or it has compatibility issues with your hardware, then move on to something else.

How can I test if it can restore my OS across RAID0 SSD successfully without actually doing a restore, and thus wiping out my current OS install?

Also, doesn't the trial lock out features, especially from the bootdisk?

 

[PTNL]

How can I test if it can restore my OS across RAID0 SSD successfully without actually doing a restore, and thus wiping out my current OS install?

If you have two spare drives, then setup another RAID-0 array and restore to that.

Also, doesn't the trial lock out features, especially from the bootdisk?

I haven't seen this when using the bootable media, and I've done image restores to machines and drives that were brand new and untouched by Acronis.

 

[Cyber Akuma]

If you have two spare drives, then setup another RAID-0 array and restore to that.

While I do have spare drives, these are the only SSD drives I own... or will own once they arrive anyway. I can set up other HDDs in RAID0, but not SSDs. And wouldn't I risk destroying the array on the SSDs if I disconnect them to create another RAID0 array with HDDs?

I haven't seen this when using the bootable media, and I've done image restores to machines and drives that were brand new and untouched by Acronis.

Hmm, I am confused about that. I mean, the bootable media has no real way to check if your trial has expired or not since it bypasses the OS (one can easily change the system clock after all) so I would expect a trial to either create a locked-down version or not even let you create a boot disk. I was mostly told by user reviews that the trial version has features locked out.

By the way, you said you have used all the versions of Acronis I mentioned, how much have you used 2013? And how would you say it compares to 2010 or 2011?

 

[PTNL]

By the way, you said you have used all the versions of Acronis I mentioned, how much have you used 2013? And how would you say it compares to 2010 or 2011?

Depending on the build of 2010 or 2011, it was a coin-toss chance that the boot CD would lock up and require a restart -- and then, for whatever reason, would work fine on later attempts. 2012 and 2013 seems more stable with the boot CD. (Full disclosure: On all versions, I was working with the Power/Plus Pack addon which also has a larger pool of controller cards in the supported list.)

The UI is mostly unchanged, but has been straight-forward for doing full/differential backups. (I hadn't had much use for incrementals due to data segregation and minimal software changes on the host drive.) I've also liked the feature that allows a "Press F11 to run Acronis Recovery", which eliminates the need for a boot CD.