I've been manually dragging & dropping files doing drive images with clonezilla for quite some time but its getting to be too much work and I'm slacking off regularly. I decided to start using the Win7 backup feature. I set up some automated backups to a network location on my main system which run nicely, though take quite some time. I then turned to my fileserver and HTPC, which are taking forever - for example, ~400GB of FLAC was 35% complete this morning after kicking off the backup on Monday!. That clearly isn't going to work. I'm after the following sort of setup... Main system: OS + data backup to a network location. Monthly full + a synthetic full every few days 2x laptops: OS every so often, kicked off manually HTPC: OS + Data to a networked location. Monthly full + a synthetic full every few days Fileserver: OS + lots of data backup up to either a different network location or maybe USB drives (still undecided) Compression is reasonably important, could save quite a bit of cash on drives. Using Win7 Ultimate on the main system and HTPC, XP Pro on the other laptops and fileserver. Can put any flavour of windows (ie, 2008 R2 or WHS) on the fileserver is needs be, or some form of *nix) Bit embarrassing asking about backups tbh, given what I do for a living. I just don't think NetBackup or TSM are going to be a sensible home solution
Microsofts robocopy, which is automatically started by windows task planner or how its called. And i suggest not using compression. Compression is really CPU intensive and not needed. Price/gb is kinda low nowadays so.
Few issues with robocopy - No open-file backups - No provision for a system image, I could really do with BMR backups for at least my main system and HTPC - As far as I can know, there's no incremental, and certainly no synthetic full backup functionality. I don't mind CPU intensive so much, as the backups will be out of hours. Any space I save with compression means I can have increased granularity in restores without buying additional storage.
I use mozy for my smaller but more valuable files, on several home PC's, as it's totally automated and works a treat (from experience). Not free but inexpensive enough to not worry me. Bigger and less valuable files (music and vids) I use AlwaysSync once a week to drop on an external hard drive.
I use this nowdays.. acronis true image home 2009 http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/ compresses well and the backups are fast.. basically does everything you could want- even browse into a full drive backup and pull out files- I've used this to restore, even over the network, not slow at all.. on my rig backup to esata it does 180 gigs in around hour and half- that's with compression.. restoring that takes around 30-40 mins the backup drive isn't up but I believe the image is under 100 gigs- so close to 2:1 with normal compression.. over the network it's a bit slower but it can recognize windows shares unlike clonezilla plus with the incremental backups.. if you want to restore for whatever reason.. boot acronis up on a usb stick, create a incremental quickly- restore the full image, then go into that incremental and retrieve whatever you lost later.. (I have to say that is pretty slow though, the actual copy speed is decent but it takes it some time to find each file you want to copy over- so if you want to transfer alot of files, better off copying the whole folder onto something before you do the restore, but it is an option) the early versions were pretty buggy, have to admit.. but the latest is solid
I use fog (http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeghost/) for cloning (a bit of overkill tbh) and I use DSynchronize (http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/) on my server box to clone my harddrives instead of RAID which took ages to resync. I have heard toucon (http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/toucan) is very good for backup.
Norton Ghost 14, yes i said Norton Its worked out great for me for a long time, i grabbed it after my 1TB had to be RMA'd long story.
I find Macrium Reflect to be excellent. http://www.macrium.com/ There have been occasions where I wish it had such-and-such feature or that I could do such-and-such, but it's being improved constantly by the devs and is already quite versatile, with its use of scripting. The support from the developers is generally excellent, I consistently see them writing lengthy scripts on the forums to help people do obscure tasks and so on.
For your important (and smaller ) files, I hear a lot of good things about Jungledisk. Syncs folders to Amazon's web space storage service which is fairly cheap. Use it in conjunction with truecrypt if you're paranoid about Amazon employees snooping...
Also Ghost 14 for me. Norton gets bad rep because of it's bloaty virus products, but Ghost is slick. Automated, scheduled back up that runs in the background with no intrusion whatsoever (justy a discreet pop up to ask if you wish to cancel a pending back up should you need max HDD bandwidth), mirroring to offsite should you need it. Bootable recovery disk. Easily to transfer images to new drives. Win back up file browser if you only need to restore a single folder or file. And it works... reliably, and completely... restoring everything as it was.. as if nothing happened. It's fast too!... It can restore my entire drive C: in 15 mins. I totally trust it - I would happily just format C: right now without checking the status of my image files... just for sh1ts and giggles. It's reasonably priced too.
Another vote for Acronis True Image 2009. I use it to make incremental backups of the entire computer every night, and a separate series of differentials once a month, on to a bunch of hard drives on one of these. Additionally, I keep a series of backups on a couple of Truecrypt-encrypted external hard drives that I store off-site.
Does Ghost do what it says on the tin, or does it allow you to select just a subset of the drive (e.g. just documents, music, photos, saved games etc)? (I'm hoping for the latter)
The latter. Fully customisable. TBH though, I just opt for a complete back up.. simpler.. safer.. doesn't take much longer, and it gives peace of mind that you have an image of how your entire system was at the time. You can select to do back ups of selected folders though if that's what you want. It obviously also does incremental backups, but I just back up the entire drives, and set it to retain 2 copies.. deleting the third (oldest one) automatically. As it backs up C one day, and D the next, I can usually roll back up to at least 48 hours ago should something happen and it inadvertently backs up something that's wrong or infected. That's just the way I do things though. If something goes wrong, I don't want to be installing windows and apps... and only have my docs, music game saves saved.. I want the entire system, right down to desktop themes and icon placement... back as it was automatically. I have a dedicated 1.5TB drive for back up only (with compression on will store 2TB) of my 2x 1tb drives. As the system drives are not full yet, I don't need compression. By the time they are full enough, 2TB drives will be cheap anyway. at £60 per TB just have a dedicated back up drive... and mirror the damned lot... just makes sense to me.
