How often do you back up?

wolfman

I use Norton Ghost for taking images of my Windows drive. Just means if anything goes wrong I can recover my system within 10minutes and don't have to spend hours reinstalling everything. I update the image about once a month.

With regards to personal files, I have them sat on a 2nd hard drive. Then I use the inbuilt Backup tool in Windows to take a backup of any files to the primary hard drive each day. Every couple of weeks, I then back up the files myself onto a usb pen.

Ideally I want to have my computer run an automated upload to an online server. Possibly encrypt the files, then upload them. I'll need to look into it.

glosman555

To quote a computer expert "There are two types of people those who back up and those who wished they'd backed up"

squeaky

And there are a whole bunch more who backed up and smugly put the backup away without checking that they could restore from it.

charlieheard

I use WinRescue. It takes a backup of key windows files, as well as any directories or files you tell it. I backup all the "My Documents" folders for the key users, as well as favourites folders, normal.dot, excel10.xlb, etc to recover my "look and feel"

I do a daily incremental backup and a weekly full backup - WinRescue manages how many to keep, etc. I backup the latest to CD. I also backup digital images separately.

I have used it twice in anger. First when my hard disk refused to work on my work laptop a few years ago and I was able to recover most of what I needed. I had missed a few key areas, so DO check what is crucial to you. The latest time was a few weeks ago, when a power surge trashed my hard disk again - Yes I have a surge protector :mad: Before rebuilding, I tried reinstalling windows with no luck, but I was also able to read parts of the hard disk for a presentation my wife was doing the next day using a CD with Knoppix on it - a bit techie, but it boots a version of Linux from your CD, and I was able to use that to burn a CD with her files on it. In the end I had to rebuild my PC with a new hard drive in a few hours.

avantra

80 GIG HDD for £28 from ebuyer + Arconis true image 7.0 for £3.95 (free full version from PCW magazine) backing up a complete image of the C drive every day automatically in the background. saved my skin few times and all for less than £35.

paulmorg

I had a bit of an incident earlier this year, and have now moved from the category of "doesn't really back up" to "backs up insanely". If you are one of those people who doesn't backup PLEASE take my advice and start now.

Copying your important files using something like the windows backup utility is certainly a good place to start. I know however that I would get annoyed by niggly little things like losing a few favorites and the last few emails, so have invested in Norton Ghost and a Hard Drive solely for backups.

I have it set up to perform a new backup every fortnight, and incremental ones several times a day. Essentially what this means is that it creates a complete copy of the drive, and then on a daily basis creates small files that record the differences between the full backup and the current state of the drive. This means that using the full backup and the relevant incremental file, you can restore to any of these points. You can also set it up to automatically delete the older ones as new backups are created.

By coincidence my pc has just performed one of those incremental backups whilst I was writing this. On my old athlon xp 1800+ I don't normally notice it is occuring, just a little box in the system tray.

Following on from what squeky was saying, I have tested the recovery and it works fine and recovers in something like 20 minutes.

Before I saw this thread I have actually posted a separate issue in this forum because I now want to try and use the backup drive out of my pc. Until I sort that out, I'll still be screwed if someone nicks my PC.

hotrod_3

I think I'm going to try using the rewritable discs idea. Still havent quite worked out how to do a proper back up yet?

Peter_Pan_6

I haven`t a clue where to start

LongJohnBaldy

Although I voted "once in a blue moon" the answer could be "never".
I use a "back up" facility in SpywareStopper and exactly what it backs up I am not sure.

camforuman

alanrowell wrote:

Never, for the simple reason that despite having over 250gb of data very little of it is irreplaceable and most of the rest is static data so only needs backing up once (well actually at least twice) and then never again.

Now a better question would be -

How many of you have used your backed up data to recreate a PC

It's not the irreplacable data as you rightly state, its the time involved in reinstalling windows and everything else, used to take me 30 hours, now with acronis or norton ghost 45mins