One of our neighbours took up my advice about making backups of his computer and bought himself two USB external drives at a very good price. He asked me yesterday what was the best way to use the drives to make a backup of his system.
Now I am no expert in this field but I do have a friend who knows a lot more than me so i will be asking him. In the meantime, as far as I can determine, there are several approaches that my neighbour could take.
1 A belt and braces approach by just copying the data from his computer hard drive to one of the external drives. He would have to remember to keep adding to the backup as he creates more data e.g.saves more pictures to his main drive. However, using this method will not save important system settings for example the information from his email program. It wouldn’t allow him to recover the whole system in the event of a crash.
2. With some versions of Microsoft Windows, you get a Backup and Restore Control Panel which will do the job for you. You just need to launch it and follow the instructions. You can specify what is to be saved and where it is to be saved using this technique.
3. The most efficient and effective method is to use a dedicated piece of software to do the work for you. The best of these will schedule backups for you and make sure that your backed up data is kept up to date.
The one I use is Acronis True Image Home which allows you to produce incremental backups as well as full backups. It has lots of other features as well and comes highly recommended. However, there are lots of other software packages out there which will do a credible job, it is just a case of finding the one which suits your needs and pocket best.
I hope this helps.
1 comment:
Backups can be difficult things, and a lot depends on what the user actually wants.
I use the extreme ends of the scale. In work it's Symantec Enterprise to perform nightly incremental backups of nine servers and a large file store. At home I do a simple file copy every couple of months and use the MozBackup utility to back up my email from Thunderbird.
My home computer really isn't that important to me in terms of file resources. If I lose a month's worth of stuff I'll cope.
Realistically most people would be fairly content to backup their documents, pictures, music and videos - basically everything that lives in their Windows 'My Documents' folder. Programs are generally reinstallable and most modern systems come with recovery disks to get your operating system back.
For full recovery you can take an image of your entire disk, but the tools to do that can often be expensive and you take your computer out of action whilst you perform the backup.
There are lots of very powerful open source backup utilities but unfortunately most of them are too powerful, being designed to back up workstations to a central server. Many USB drives ship with backup software as well - I'm sure Freecom bundle something with their drives.
As you've said Keith, the windows backup system will probably meet most people's needs, and the newer your operating system, the better it is. I think the one in Windows 7 is pretty powerful, whilst the one in XP home is much less so.
I'm not sure I could recommend a free product (as I don't use one!) but a quick google search shows about a dozen within easy reach.
It all depends on your needs. Do you want simple full backups? Incremental backups? Differential backups? Versioning?
It's all back to what you said - you pays your money, you takes your choice.
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