Why Backup? 9 Good Reasons (and YOUR backup questions answered) - Comments Page 2

I have a 3 tb seagate external hard drive. It did a terrific job with backups with the software provided. When I got my new Dell desktop with windows 10, it said it won't work with 10. How can I use this external drive to do an entire back up of the computer? Is there another program software I can use or must I get another drive that works with 10? Thanks for your help.

I tried AOMEI Backupper Pro 4.0.2 at giveawayoftheday.com. Would not install on WIN 7.

I also tried AOMEI Backupper Pro 4.0.2 at giveawayoftheday.com. Installed on Windows 10 but licence key supplied was invalid. Waste of time.

Just do file backups or file copies often. Clean installs of Windows 10 are easy and fast. Then just reinstall your applications.

Dear Bob,
I have my important documents stored in One Drive. For the computer, I regularly make back-ups using the System Image that comes with Windows 10.
I also have a Western Digital external hard drive that I planned to use for a back-up of my computer's hard drive, but downloading the software for the back-ups defeated me. So, for now, I am sticking with the system image.

So, what backup program will provide real-time or upon-shutdown incremental backups of data, including email?

I bought Acronis 2016 and finally uninstalled it. It provided incremental backups of my HDD (the only way to get email backed up), and these were scheduled. When Acronis filled my 3TB external drive up, rather than overwrite old data, the program simply "failed." (I did use the cloning feature to install a new HDD; that was OK.)

My biggest problem with doing backup is that when I first started using a computer,I was taught to always turn it off when I was finished. That makes it very difficult for a backup program to backup anything. I still do turn off my computer when I am finished with whatever I was doing. And nowdays with SSD drives it doesn't take much time to boot up a computer. So what I do now is save whatever I am working on to a thumb drive when I am using my laptop or when using my desktop to a secondary internal hard drive.

I have my OS and programs on a 128GB SSD. My data is stored on four 4TB drives in my computer. I have four 4TB backup drives for every data drive in my computer—two kept onsite at home and two kept offsite in my safe deposit box at my credit union (the extra backup drive per data drive in each location is in case one of the backup drives in that location dies; all drives are subject to irrecoverable failure at any time). The onsite backup drives get swapped out with the offsite drives no less than once a month. I connect a backup drive to my computer only when updating the backup.

I use Macrium Reflect to make full images of my 128GB SSD before installing updates or making any changes to the computer. I store the images in a folder on one of my data drives, keeping only the previous 8 weeks of images. Normally, keeping backup images inside the computer is a bad idea but that drive also gets backed up to an external backup drive.

I backup my data using FreeFileSync. It's much faster and efficient than imaging or cloning for backing up data. I have a versioning folder on one of my data drives for FreeFileSync to send data to when deleted by FreeFileSync. I clean out the older files and noncritical files when that folder gets too full. I run my data backups frequently, depending on how often I add data.

Since data added or changed in my computer after I put backup drives into my safe deposit box will be lost if I should lose my computer and onsite backups, I also have a Carbonite.com cloud backup account I can use to recover any files not on the offsite backups if the unthinkable should ever happen. The Carbonite account is also handy for accessing data with my notebook when on the road and I have a secure internet connection.