Should You Backup Everything? - Comments Page 1

Category: Backup




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Posted by:

Jonathan
19 Jan 2017

My family and I have learned most of the computer stuff we know, from you Bob, THANK YOU!

I took to task your oft repeated admonishments to back up, and I did so fairly consistently.

And then came the day I needed it, but my external drive, plug and play, decided that now would be a good time for it to refuse to be recognized, saying software was required(none is available as it was supposedly not needed.

So I guess two back ups are needed to be certain you actually have one.... or three ... or four :-)

Posted by:

John Wafford
19 Jan 2017

I think it's necessary to distinguish between images and clones. I have used XXClone for about ten years and it has saved me on several occasions.

Because a clone is an exact (nearly) copy of your bootup drive, if you go into Windows Explorer, the files on your clone can be accessed just as if they were on your main drive. This also means that if your main drive should fail, you can simply boot into one of your clones. Because of an incident about ten years ago, I'm now fanatical about keeping backups. I make an alternating two-weekly full clone backup on two separate disks on my machine with nightly incremental backups to both. In addition I have two Samsung Portable disks, updated monthly, that I keep offsite in the unlikely event of the house catching fire.

Posted by:

John Wafford
19 Jan 2017

I forgot to say in my last post, that not only do the image backups that Bob uses and the clone backups that I use save a lot of time by not having to reinstall everything, should the worst occur, but they are also quicker to setup in the first place. Instead of having to sort out which data to include (and it's easy to miss some), you simply copy everything.

Posted by:

Paul
19 Jan 2017

I do a full image weekly & differentials every other day. I notice that you do incrementals. What is the difference between them?

Posted by:

Eileen
19 Jan 2017

Admit my back up style would probably find me struggling but one of the lucky ones that hasn't had a failure on a hard drive. Okay, just jinxed myself but my issue with them is, I want to keep my OLDER photos/documents/contacts PLUS getting the changes so now I just back up photos/docs by manually giving them a different name so keeping the new and the old. Hope you can follow this but I don't know how to accomplish this doing automatic backups.
Your "Geeky Update" is easy to follow, informative and current. So, we have a GUY!Thank you.

Posted by:

Steve
19 Jan 2017

Hi Bob,
just thought I'd add my praise to how helpful your articles are. Although I would not consider myself computer ignorant having been around since "Windows 95", it is so easy in this day and age to become complacent with our busy lives, so I am grateful for your articles (this one in particular) which keep us all current and up to date and prompt me to think again!
Keep up the good work!!

Posted by:

Brad
19 Jan 2017

I am the IT Director/System Administrator for two family-owned businesses and solely responsible for about 240 computers. A few months ago, one of our technology-challenged employees clicked an email attachment that installed ransomware on a server containing nearly 40 years of customer data. If I had not made an image backup the afternoon before, the biggest highlight of my day would be saying, "would you like fries with that?"

Posted by:

howard
19 Jan 2017

Back a few years when Hungary had major floods and the Western Digital facility was damaged I had a WD hard drive which I had a backup image of. It failed after a few weeks and was replaced by WD under warranty. I was back running as previously within 15 minutes. That disk lasted 1 week and was replaced again. This one lasted only one day and I asked WD if I could have a replacement from their Taiwan facility. This they did and it is still working correctly after many years now. Each time the image got me going in only a few minutes a great time saver. I appreciate your emails very useful for an old guy like me.

Posted by:

Sheri
19 Jan 2017

I used to back up only my user files because I always used to prefer to re-install Windows from scratch, in the days when I had a retail copy of Windows on an optical disc. I preferred this so that my system would be brand new again and not be bogged down with loads of file and program fragments. But I did sometimes forget to include 'user files' that are NOT stored on your Data Drive but in the program's folder on C drive! This is especially true for emails :-/

But when I bought a new PC with Windows 8 pre-installed, I was no longer able to re-install Windows from scratch using a retail disc. It was also about that time that Microsoft (in their ultimate wisdom - not) decided to implement secure boot, which PREVENTS the computer starting from even a Windows retail disc! And I find that trying to get into the boot options menu and then selecting the correct option is an utter nightmare.

So I now make an image of my system the first time I use it. I then uninstall all the crapware and install my programs and hardware and make another image of my system. Then if I have to recover my PC using one of these images, I get all Windows Updates installed and then make a third, updated image to replace the first one. I find this back up system works quite well :-) AND if you use Macrium Reflect free version, you can add an option to make your PC boot into Macrium Reflect if it ever fails ;-)

Posted by:

Sheri
19 Jan 2017

Forgot to say, I also back up my data to one internal drive, 3 external drives and the cloud on a daily basis, using SyncBackFree ;-)

Posted by:

JC
19 Jan 2017

Great advice. I would add it is very important to make the restore software, the CD or Thumb drive that does the restore, and TEST it to be sure it works. If the backup software is worth having it has a "verification" for the image, that you should run every time you make one. I say if it isn't verified, it isn't backed up.

Posted by:

Jonathan
19 Jan 2017

I should add to my first posted comments that my external drive always tested okay, and stored the back up every time I ran one, and they were okay also.

It was when I needed it that the external drive itself would not open, not that the back up was bad. I couldn't get to anything. The drive was dead. It asked for software that did not exist.

So I agree, only one back up source is no back up at all sometimes.

Posted by:

marilyn colby
19 Jan 2017

what i do not understand is how a back-up system works. i do not want to have 100 back-ups of the same thing. will a back-up entirely erase the previous back-up, or just add what is more recent to the old back-up.

Posted by:

John C
19 Jan 2017

My backup story...

Being a retired IT guy, MIS computer operator then network/system administrator, I always spent the time backing up data. Backups are truly an under estimated thing, and should be made part of the computer routine.

What to backup versus what not to is an answer and question equivalent to what's someone else's garbage is another's treasure. The best solution is to backup data only.

Doing a full versus incremental backup is something to consider as well. A full backup means a lot of extra time, but everything will be backed up no matter what. Incremental backups mean going through multiple backups to bring the data up-to-date, and there's a chance that something might have been lost in between, though there are some advantages to incremental backups as well if one is prone to Oops moments and deletes stuff all too often.

In the end I opted for a full data backup daily, well nightly as that ensured I got everything.

The mantra I was taught many years ago is programs can be reinstalled easily and with the cloud-based installers for many applications these days including games, such as those on Steam, for example, the programs are installed quickly.

Data though, well that's truly the most important and once that's lost it's lost. Once the data is gone it's gone. There's rarely a way to get it back, and unless we have a lot of money to spend on truly critical data, the drive recovery services are the only solution but not always guaranteed.

Now being one that touted backing up, and did multiple system backups professionally, I was not always kind to my own stuff. Needless to say I learned the hard way after a catastrophic hardware failure with a blown power supply which killed not just my boot drive, but also took out my data drive along with the motherboard and video card.

Let's say I didn't follow my own practices and got lazy and got burned!

After that I perform daily backups of my data using a simple file copy program called FastCopy. With FastCopy, I can queue up various backup jobs by running multiple instances of the program. I'll have one instance backing up my documents folder to my external drive which will end and then the next job will take over and backup my extensive Trainz data folder, which contains nearly 800GB of data. Losing that data would mean nearly 14 years of content creation gone and the end result would be quite devastating. Not that my storm-chasing pictures, videos, personal music performances, and important documents are not important either.

With an immanent hard disk failure approaching recently, I replaced the drive and simply restored the data in about 8 hours. Sure this wasn't a drive image or a VHD, but individual files and folders. I did the hardware replacement quickly then started the restores (copies) from backup sources to internal drives when I went to bed. Overnight my data was restored on the data drives and I was up and running the next morning.

Having a reliable backup solution is really important - case in point - I found this out the hard way many years ago. I used to use a tape backup system to backup my "important" data. Periodically I would test the backups and restore the data to another system. Well, the drive was okay, but the tapes were not. I was doing fake backups as I called them. This was not good and was the same as no backup at all but with a lot of extra work.

So in the end even if we do backups, even to an external hard drive, or even to the cloud for that matter, check that the data is there. You don't want to find out at the critical time that the only backup you thought you had is not even a backup!

Posted by:

Scott Brooks
19 Jan 2017

I realize that everyone has their own organizational system and the organizational system of one person may not work for someone else. So, with this said, here is an organizational thing I do that may or may not be of help to any of you. On my C: drive, I have a folder called +HomeData. Over time I have added an entire directory structure of many levels of subfolders and files under C:\+HomeData. I do image backups for my whole drive, but for individual files that I want to backup (so I can restore them without having to do a whole image restore), I include the whole C:\+HomeData directory as well as other important files. The reason the name starts with a plus sign is so that it sorts to the top of the list when I open Windows Explorer – which makes it easy to find. Over time this has helped me in knowing that any files that I would like to put under +HomeData will get backed up.

Posted by:

John Wafford
19 Jan 2017

@Paul
"I do a full image weekly & differentials every other day. I notice that you do incrementals. What is the difference between them?"

I suspect these are different terminology for the same thing. In other words, just making any changes that took place since the last backup.

Posted by:

John Wafford
19 Jan 2017

@Marilyn Colby
"what i do not understand is how a back-up system works. i do not want to have 100 back-ups of the same thing. will a back-up entirely erase the previous back-up, or just add what is more recent to the old back-up."

If you do a full backup, it will overwrite whatever is there. An incremental backup just adds any changes that have been made.

Posted by:

Roger Woody
19 Jan 2017

The last 5 years I've used Acronis to make 2 ongoing differential/full backups, full image (entire C drive) and Users only to an external USB hard drive. I spend about $20 every other year to keep it current. The real beauty of the system is how easy it is to recover a file that I deleted by mistake. I go to the backup folder, find the file and reinstall it where it belongs on my computer hard drive.

Posted by:

Thomas T
19 Jan 2017

Just a quick reminder to Scott Brooks... I use Macrium Free backup and I only make Image backups of my entire disk.

With reference to your comment: "I do image backups for my whole drive, but for individual files that I want to backup (so I can restore them without having to do a whole image restore), I include the whole C:\+HomeData directory as well as other important files."

If I want to restore an individual file or files or a folder, Macrium Restore function gives me a complete file tree of the backup file and allows me to pick any files/folders I want without having to restore the entire backup image. I suspect that other image backup programs can do this too.

So the one image backup can be used to restore any number of individual files easily. No need to do a separate backup of important files.

For example, you could easily find your +Homedata directory in the Macrium backup image and restore it or any files from it.

Posted by:

bob rice
19 Jan 2017

I have a file by file clone backup, but more important, it's bootable. This is not the case with most backups. So twice a year, I enter Bios/setup and change the boot sequence to my backup drive, then start up.

The backup drive is tested. The process takes about two minutes. If the primary drive fails, I replace it and use the backup to populate the new drive.

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