Talk to me about back up.. so my friend has a new PC i have built him and he has a external hard drive that will be plugged in 24/7. as it is for SOHO use and he has allot of mission critical data for his small business. (Accounts/Music) he is a mobile DJ. Now what i would like is a master back up with incremental back ups on a weekly/Bi-weekly basis. Now the issue is when i have played with back up on my PC I'm finding i am using allot of space. is there a way to have a complete back up solution without using more disk space than is realistically required. All on W7 Thanks PS, he will have 2 internal hard drives will it back up system disk and the mp3 disc? if so how do i set this up.
win 7 ulti edition allows you to back up to external drives/network locations. If the data he has IS that critical then the disks should be in RAID 5 (3 disks) config in his desktop, this will prevent data loss in most cases. If he wants the belt and bracers too then you can configure windows back up to do a full back up once/twice a week of the critical data, i wouldnt worry about backing up windows itself as you can always just re-install it, just get the data he needs. I wouldnt go for a full then incrementals when using windows back up, this could cause you some headaches when trying to perform a restore of the data, just use full and delete down back ups older than a couple of weeks. Compression (disk space saving), Windows back up doesnt offer any (if memory serves), again you need a bit of software to do that for you. Another option is to buy a NAS box that comes with client/server back up software pre-installed which would allow you to config what/when/how you back up his data, while also managing restores for you when required. If he really wants only 1 full back up and then incrementals forever then there is only 1 product on the market that allows for this, Tivoli Storage manager, which is very expensive for what your suggesting, all other products need (best practice for them) a once a week full back up. If the data is that important to him i would suggest the NAS box path, gives best bang for your buck.
I would recommend Acronis True Image Home. You can customise what you want to back-up for more readily than you can with any Windows back-up version, and there are numerous 'bells & whistles' that I will let you find out for yourself. Most importantly, it has a rather neat differential back-up feature which I use: It take a full back-up (which might be just his data rather than Windows + Applications) and then it does a differential backup (a backup of anything changed since the last full back-up) for the next x times, then it will repeat the cycle - take another full back-up etc. This means you need a full backup + the last differential in order to recover your data. It can obviously do incremental backups (where changes since the last incremental backup are recorded) but I don't like incremental backups as much. If one file is lost/corrupted you lose everything from that point on, and should you want to restore something, it can be a pain (IMHO). The point is, it is cheap and extremely configurable, and in four years of use, a very reliable platform.
