Computer backup

[Jeff423]

I've always backed up my computer and recently realized that I have no idea as to how to restore it from a BU.
Consequently I bought Acronis and have started cloning my C drive to two external drives. I alternate drives every week so I always have two BU's. The only time the external drives are connected to the computer is when they are "cloning". This works great and is very easy to restore from either drive. But it is time consuming and I'm wondering if there is a way to do an "incremental" clone. My C drive is a 250gb SSD - if that makes any difference.
I figured I could ask Acronis but I don't think I could understand their answer.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Krell1]

I have an external hard drive with 1TB of memory. All the files I really need to keep are saved to that drive whenever I make changes. The drive is part of my home network and very easy to use. If my laptop ever dies, I'll have all my stuff on the external drive ready for access by another computer. Works well for me.

[dcxplant]

Originally Posted by Krell1

I have an external hard drive with 1TB of memory. All the files I really need to keep are saved to that drive whenever I make changes. The drive is part of my home network and very easy to use. If my laptop ever dies, I'll have all my stuff on the external drive ready for access by another computer. Works well for me.

Consider doing what the OP is doing, dual backups on separate drives.

Some BU drives feature two or more drives to act like mirror images of your computer, or you can manually swap them like the OP does.

I bought a RAID (redundant array of individual disks) system with two hard-drives that connects wirelessly. I use a Mac, which automatically does complete computer back-ups every few hours, every day. So there are constantly two separate backups completely independent of each other (but housed in the same unit in two drive bays).

If one drive fails, and drives ALWAYS FAIL eventually, the theory is that both won't fail at the same time. You pull out the bad drive from it's tray, and install a new one, bam, back in business.

For Windows users, I'm sure there is a way to perform automatic backups also.

If I were to buy a backup today, I would go with a solid state memory kind, as the high-speed disks seem to fail more often.

[3dots]

Good to hear the people are backing up. I'm GM for ACE Data Group, LLC, data recovery division. Your SSD is probably an array of MLC (not SLC) NAND RAM chips and stats show that they will start to develop cell damage within 18-24 months of normal use. When the spares pool is used up, the system will lock into a "busy" state and you're toast. SSD recovery ranges between $1500 and $8000. Don't think for a minute that solid state technology is any more reliable that traditional media; it's not.

There are a multitude of BU software apps out there from freeware to payware and most have endless configuration options. Just stay away from any that create one large backup file (other than a TRUE full disk image which is a different thing). The reason being is that if you have any head-bounce causing sector damage or cell damage in the case of SSD, inside that BU file, it can render the entire file unusable.

From a recovery standpoint, it's best to use a program that makes individual folder and file entries into the file system whether it's FAT, NTFS, HFS or some Super-Block file system...it doesn't matter. Just do a little research and you'll find out about the incremental BU options if available in your BU program.

[Aticus]

3Dots, that's good advice. I'm not a computer professional but ask me who had to pay $600 some years ago to recover from a bad motherboard with no back up. Boy do I like Time Machine.

[dcxplant]

Good info 3Dots

I don't feel so bad about not having SSD backups now. My G-RAID (two hard drives) is going strong for about three years now.

[cmort666]

For people with a lot of apps to reinstall, I HIGHLY recommend creating a base image with something like Ghost.

My main PC recently died. I didn't lose ANY data, but I've spent (and will continue to spend for a while) CONSIDERABLE time reinstalling apps, and finding license keys so that I COULD reinstall apps which were downloaded from the publisher. I'm just VERY lucky that I know how to read and recover Thunderbird emails so that I could find emailed license keys from before I switched primary email providers.

I've repeatedly recommended Ghost to my boss from my last good job. He's a "tinkerer" and I've had to rebuild his office desktops on MULTIPLE occasions. He's planning to switch to a SSD and is going to go through this all over again. He could use something like Clonezilla, but I'd bet that the source drive has more on it than he's going to have free space to start on the SSD.

[3dots]

Originally Posted by dcxplant

Good info 3Dots

I don't feel so bad about not having SSD backups now. My G-RAID (two hard drives) is going strong for about three years now.

Guys,

Watch your RAID levels on these out-of-the-box units and make sure your configuration is fault tolerant. Most OEMs try to sell capacity and you'll wind up with a default config of RAID 0 (stripe set, no parity). The more drives you have, the better the odds are for failure. RAID 1, 5 and 10 are the most common fault tolerant configs that can be set up in these consumer boxes depending on the number of drives.

RAIDs are not the answer to data security, they're the answer to uptime. Last year we recovered and processed ~3.2 petabyte of data. A lot of that was from cutting-edge gear such as EqualLogic and Compellent iSCSI SANs used by large corporations, government and military entities, I won't mention names .

A single source of data is never secure, redundancy is the key. So, BU your RAIDs too! The OPs concern for restore is a very legitimate one. We receive projects everyday wherein the BUs were no good and the primary source of data has failed or has become corrupted. The only way to be sure is to periodically restore, or at least start to restore, your BUs to an alternate location/target media.