Should You Backup Everything? - Comments Page 2

Paul & John Wafford

To restore if you do differentials, you need the original full image (or file backup) + the last differential.

To restore if you do incrementals, you need the original full image + all the incrementals in-between.

So incrementals are quicker and take less space (each of them), but if a single one is corrupted then you'll only be able to restore up to the date where the chain of incrementals has not been broken.

Some people mix full, differential and incremental in their routine, so as to balance the advantages and drawbacks of each.

I back up every day or two to a USB external disk, alternating differentials between two disks.

Weekly, I copy the latest backup to another pair of disks, alternating between two disks. (Four disks altogether.)

At the beginning of each month, I make a full image backup of all partitions on the "C" drive, and a full file backup of my precious data files that I keep on an external disk.

Every month, I have to copy the two new full backups ("C" drive and my data) to three other disks.

The sizes of the image backup files are a nuisance. A month's backup of the "C" drive grows to 300 GB, which I reduce to 130 GB by deleting earlier differentials.

I don't use incremental backups because a failure in the chain of backups renders all subsequent backups inaccessible.

I use Macrium Reflect Home 64-bit (UEFI).

Aside: I haven't figured out what's making the backup program produce such large differential backups. I don't defrag the disk.

I've had two WD portable USB disks fail. Ironically, they were backup disks.

I use easeus todo backups home 8.9
to me this backup program is tops, It will put my computer back to the way it was when the backup was done. I mean everything it's like a copy of the hard Drive or file exactly, it does the hole Dr. Oper,system,programs,everything. I've been using it for over 5 years, I have not had it fall me yet,

C.Brown

P.S.

You the man when it comes to helpful hints for computers.

Is a disk image the same as a clone? If not which one is recommended as a safeguard to protect against a disk crash?

I used to consider myself one step above novice but not so much anymore. This whole backup thing confuses me.

I downloaded the restore information on my HP to a restore disk which I assume will restore me to factory but it will restore to Win 8. But that will delete all data. Should I have a full drive image besides this and will it work to restore my HP? I could care less if I have the proprietary stuff but what happens to the shared F keys and the touchpad? I would prefer a clean install and just restore the important files. I am using IDrive and IDrive cloud. Love your Bob Rankin. Read it faithfully.
Lost in Missouri.

Hi Bob,

I read your newsletter pretty religiously (unless it covers something that doesn't apply to me). You do great work, and I hope you continue for as long as you can. I've taken several of your suggestions and put them to use -- thanks!

I use the same backup strategy as you: Full image Monday morning, incrementals the other six days of the week. I use Macrium Reflect and recommend it highly. It has saved me a couple of times with full restores, and a couple of times when I needed to restore specific files or folders. I back up to a 2 Tb external drive and copy them immediately to another 1 Tb external. The copy is done with the handy scripting utility in Macrium - it's great. I only wish I had a reasonable way to further copy them somewhere in "the cloud." The problem is that my full images are ranging aroud 145 Gb and my daily incrementals from 1.5 - 9 Gb. Even at my maximum upload speed, this would take a whole lot of time, especially for the full image. Any suggestions on how to get around this limitation would be appreciated. Meanwhile, keep up the great work!

@Clairvaux
That's true for images, but not clones. With a clone, an incremental backup updates the original full clone, so that however many incremental backups you do, you will only have one updated full clone. That's the advantage of clones over images.

Hi all. Some of you have said that Program Files are easily re-installed from discs on hand after a crash, but that is partially untrue. In my case the PC Technicians at the shop where I bought my PC installed my Internet connection and I had to take the machine back to them so that I could call up my User Interface when I needed to see how much data I still had on hand. I don't think they used an installation disc, but rather a wand, like Harry Potter). So now, I don't neglect that first step.

@ John Elliot

A clone is a unretouched photograph of your disk.

An image is a compressed and retouched photograph of your disk. Free space has been taken out. Files, which are scattered all over the place on your disk, are defragmented in the image (all the bits of the same file a grouped in the same place).

Typical use of a clone is when you want to upgrade to a bigger disk or an SSD. You then copy your old disk to the new as a clone.

Typical use of an image is when you want to backup your disk in case something bad happens. You then copy it to a single file as an image (on another disk, obviously), and restore it to the original disk if you need to.

I just do a full bootable clone once or twice a week, which takes a little longer, but I do it at the end of my session and click on the auto-shutoff feature. Restoring from a clone does not require a workable bootable CD, which can get outdated or misplaced!

A clone will fully protect you from a complete hard drive failure - but will also enable full access to each individual file on the backup - should you want to only restore part of your data. Each time I choose to overwrite my previous clone, but extra external drives can be used to keep a series of back clones, if so desired

Using cloning as an exclusive backup strategy seems unrealistic to me. It's incredibly greedy in terms of space, unless you keep only one backup. Which, in turn, would be dangerous, because how do you know that the last good version (uncorrupted by malware or by software defects) will be the one you just made ?

You don't know, that's why you need a history of backups to fall upon. Images plus incrementals, or differentials (or both) provide that. Plus, they are smaller. And they still allow selective file browsing and restoration.

Now it might make sense to have one extra disk on which you clone once a week, for instance. This might allow you to boot directly from it if anything happens. Provided that backup was not already infected by ransomware, for instance.

I use a set of four backup drives for each data drive in my computer: two of each set is kept onsite and the other two are kept offsite. I now use FreeFileSync to update the backups, giving me essentially clones without the disadvantages of frequent cloning. When updating the backups, I run each drive of each onsite set separately, one after the other. I also have a Carbonite account for recovering data that hasn't been backed up on my backup drives yet.

The number of backup drives may seem excessive but having the seemingly extra backup drive saved my bacon...er...data once. I tried to backup one of my data drives on a Friday evening, not realizing it had somehow became corrupted, and wound up corrupting and crashing the backup drive (I was still cloning back then). If I hadn't had that second backup drive, I would have had to wait until Tuesday (of, course, it was a three day holiday weekend) to retrieve my offsite backup from my safe deposit box at my credit union, recover what I could from that drive, then retrieve the rest of the data I had added and changed since I put the backup drive in my safe deposit box from Carbonite which would have taken a few hours.

However, since I had the second backup drive, I was able to use it to recover my data drive and the crashed backup drive after reformatting them. Since I knew what data I had added since the previous backup, I was able to copy it to another drive before formatting the corrupted drive (fortunately, that data wasn't corrupted, sparing me from having to download it from Carbonite.

Thanks to that second backup drive, I was able to recover in just four hours instead of five days. Keep in mind that any drive, including backup drives, can fail irrecoverably at anytime with no warning so having more than one backup is essential (data should exist in at least three places, such as on a computer, on an onsite backup, and on an offsite backup). Also, you can't recover data that hasn't been backed up so it is essential to keep backups as up to date as possible.