Back Up My Computer

closed

The average consumer doesn't have a windows disc, and what not.

The average consumer is likely to have a windows/virus/disk/slow machine problem at some point, then what.

The average consumer backs up nothing.

The extra time and cost to backup windows is negligible.

imgburn comes with bloat you don't need.

Thousands of hours of effort/frustration would have been prevented on this board alone, if everyone spent a few minutes doing an image backup before their machine went wrong.

somersethillbilly

anotheruser wrote: »

All my programs and games I can download and install again from online so there's no real point in backing those up - yes it would save time restoring but the cost of backing those up, plus the time it will take to actually back up, then restore, you'll find the difference time wise isn't that great.

Personally I go for the 10-15 minute restore everytime from a disk image backup.

debitcardmayhem

somersethillbilly wrote: »

Personally I go for the 10-15 minute restore everytime from a disk image backup.

Me too, especially I only do a full image after major updates (once a month), and incremental daily backups of program data/app data and docs etc.

securityguy

"Personally I go for the 10-15 minute restore everytime from a disk image backup."

Quite.

The two magic numbers for enterprise backup are worth considering for home users too. Those are RPO and RTO: recovery point objective and recovery time objective. RPO is how much data you lose: do your backups take you up to last month, last week, ten minutes ago? And RTO is how long it takes to spin that backup onto a machine and use it. So if you back up once a month, and the backups take a day to recover, then you have an RPO of 29 days (the worst case being things go bang the day before you do your backup) and an RTO of a day.

The problem with "oh, I could download this, reinstall that" is it's not just a one day's delay, it's also a day you need to be stood over the machine doing stuff. Not fun it you have to work. If you have a disk image, you can recover the machine by plugging the disk in and going to work for the day: it'll be cooked when you're back.

So Apple's Time Machine is, for home users, the way things should be: you get backups every hour, so worst case lose an hour and a bit's data. And you can recover by setting it going and heading to the pub. It'll recover onto essentially bare metal, as the recovery software is included on the OS installation disk. There are similar solutions for Windows, I'm sure.

I just don't understand people who don't have decent backups. They're not hard, the portable drives(s) you need aren't expensive, the consequences of not doing it are potentially catastrophic. Rather than worrying about the minimum you can get away with, just buy a pair of external drives, leave one plugged in to protect against hardware failure and corruptions, and every few weeks swap it with the other, keeping the unplugged one offsite. What's so hard?

Heedtheadvice

Anotheruser's policy is a big risk - unless you don't want to recover ANYTHING easily. Pity the guy who doesn't do any backup only to find a problem and "the only thing I wanted is now lost!"

Go with the advice of Securityguy ( pity it wasn't in simple language), Closed etc.

Remember: Proper Planning Prevents P P P and data loss........
Not everything can be downloaded quickly, easily or cheaply and installing/setting takes a lot longer than copying an image etc.

anotheruser

I'm not saying don't back up anything, just don't over complicate it.

closed wrote: »

The average consumer doesn't have a windows disc, and what not.

They should have. A restore disk will come with every Windows machine sold from a reputable retailer.

closed wrote: »

The average consumer is likely to have a windows/virus/disk/slow machine problem at some point, then what.

True, but restoring from an old backup image may just put the problem back. (in the case of a slow computer, which is more likely than data loss.)

closed wrote: »

The average consumer backs up nothing.

I disagree. Although also think a lot of consumers are now aware and choose not to bother.

closed wrote: »

The extra time and cost to backup windows is negligible.

Depends. My PC would take over 24 hours to back up as an image. But then I have my PC set up with six hard drives of varing sizes and types.

closed wrote: »

imgburn comes with bloat you don't need.

Erm... this is false.
It's a tiny program that is simple to use and covers most bases for what the majority of people would need from it.
Nero however comes with lots of other Nero software that must be installed for the burner to work. Was good in the late 90's but since then, people got wise.

closed wrote: »

Thousands of hours of effort/frustration would have been prevented on this board alone, if everyone spent a few minutes doing an image backup before their machine went wrong.

True, but again, creating an image may copy the problem. Much better to backup what you want, rather than 90% of useless things. Even the in-build backup tool can work sufficiently well.


Saying things like "create an image, back it up here, then another to DVD and then do this and that" is exactly what puts many people off because it doesn't need to be that complicated, for something that in real terms isn't a significant problem. Users can learn to make images and back up larger volumes after they get to grips with the basics of backing up. The first step is to drag and drop your Documents (which includes photos, music... whatever is typically found in "My Documents") and back that up. Once a user is fine with doing this every X months, then they can learn more advanced techniques.

Yes, when a computer fails for one reason or another, the results can be horrible, but then for every one PC that has failed to the extent it has lost the data forever, there are at least fifty more that are working well.

It's like people saying "get three anti-viruses as what one misses, the other will pick up" and "don't forget to add a firewall and malware scanner" <-- all this lot will slow down your PC and during the early 00's there was a lot of scaremongering on what you actually need, rather than educating people to not click on links that are emailed to them, even if they look like they're from the bank or whatever.
If you're not expecting the email, just delete it, or even better if using Outlook.com, mark it as Junk or a phishing scam. The more people do it, the more MS filters will stop it coming through in the first place.

The other problem is people who talk about backing images up and this and that think they suddenly know everything there is to know about computers.

Sorry for the long post.

closed

It takes around 15 seconds to kick off an image backup, and a couple of minutes to kick off a restore from backup, nothing complicated at all. There is a video on how to do it in one of my threads.

Backing up after you've messed up a machine is obviously going to be fruitless.

if your backup is going to take 24 hours, 23.75 hours of that won't be due to backing up windows.

Your assumption that reputable dealers supply a windows disc is well out of date, as is your statement about imgburn

Latest version of imgburn, as of 30 minutes ago, 8 different AV products detected unwanted bloat.

https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/ab5ab68b541c0de51d7e9eafe1cbe5267347c1e6edf1faeedc79e01fd774375e/analysis/

There's half a dozen threads just on this front techie page of mse, some of which have been going on for days, if the op's had a clean image backup, they would be working happily now.

henm2

closed wrote: »

It takes around 15 seconds to kick off an image backup, and a couple of minutes to kick off a restore from backup, nothing complicated at all. There is a video on how to do it in one of my threads.

There's half a dozen threads just on this front techie page of mse, some of which have been going on for days, if the op's had a clean image backup, they would be working happily now.

Excellent advice. Other good image/backup software includes Redo Backup http://redobackup.org/ and also clonezilla http://clonezilla.org/

Jivesinger

anotheruser wrote: »

They should have. A restore disk will come with every Windows machine sold from a reputable retailer.

closed wrote: »

Your assumption that reputable dealers supply a windows disc is well out of date

+1 to that.

I've seen reports that nowadays some brands of laptops don't even let you create DVDs (or bootable USB files) of the Factory Restore for use when your computer's internal disk dies.

Heedtheadvice

Anotheruser wrote

I'm not saying don't back up anything, just don't over complicate it.

Glad you clarified, I might have misrepresented you.

You also said

Yes, when a computer fails for one reason or another, the results can be horrible, but then for every one PC that has failed to the extent it has lost the data forever, there are at least fifty more that are working well.

so there is a big chance 'your own' PC will go wrong and if there is anything of value it's worth taking action to prevent this horrible occurrence.

You are probably not typical with your 6 drive set up (maybe even with a raid array to give you more resilience?) so probably not a good example to use. Many people have 1 laptop or 1 PC with no backup and increasingly used to store, for example, their pictures or their letters/emails or other important records.

If they did not back up for a year and became one of the 50 computers to have a problem (let alone a complete hard drive loss/horrible result) and they had not taken a few simple and easy steps to do an image, rescue disk or backup of data (even if they needed somebody technically competent to reinstall the backups) then they feel pretty sick - after the event. The less a user knows how easy it is to be subjected to a problem then the less likely they are to have protection till it's too late!

Given the complexity of PCs, the amount of data they hold and often the use they get they can be considered quite reliable, if sometimes annoying and frustrating. However if one values what is on them...

A stitch in time saves....... many a lost Gigabyte