Something better than Win7 Backup

[randomrogue]

Here's the problem. Win7 Backup appears to do 1 full backup and then incrementals. However after about a week I have no idea what it's doing. So I have 1.1TB of data that I want backed up and what I think it's doing is creating a Full Backup, Incremental, Incremental, and so on and then suddenly deciding that for the next marker it's going to do a Full Backup. Well in order for that to work I'd need a ridiculous amount of storage. As it is my backup drive is 2TB. To make matters worse it seems to only create one marker so there's no way to reduce the size of the bloated backup. 1.1TB can take up 1.5TB of space. My data will only increase.

On top of that the times it needs to backup data are enormous. It's not even reasonable. I did some reading and apparently Microsoft had no intention of people using Windows Backup for anything over 200GB of data. That's highly unrealistic. My photos are shot in RAW and they take up a lot of space.

What software out there can reliably, and with reasonable speed, do a Full Backup followed by daily incrementals? Is there a better way to backup such large amounts of data? My motherboard refuses to mirror my drives so that seems out of the question.

 

[Iron Wolf]

Acronis True Image Home is what I use. You can choose to do file or drive level backups and the interface is very simple and easy to use. It is also much faster then the default Win 7 backup, and also very transparent what files are backed up when and where to.

Another option is Norton Ghost. I don't have any personal experience with it, but in terms of feature set, it seems very comparable to Acronis.

Both are not free, however. Just like you pay extra for third party internet security versus the default win firewall, win defender and MSE, using one of the above will set you back $50 or so versus the OS version.

Edit: One I would not recommend is Nero Backitup, either standalone or with the larger CD/DVD editing suite. I tried it and it continually choked and would not perform backups successfully.

 

[Gooberlx2]

I find Win7's backup good for the system image, but poor for regular data.

Part of it is that certain services (such as the WMP Network Sharing, even the indexing service sometimes) will change a property, attribute, piece of metadata, whatever and cause the file to be considered for the next incremental.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...p/thread/e8a27814-7f7b-4ca4-b9e1-82f69c974988
http://social.technet.microsoft.com...l/thread/50f3ff7a-2ae7-41c1-ac92-41edaed1e2f9

Additionally, Windows 7's incrementals aren't deduplicated, so it wastes more space than is needed. You get full copies of each file every time.

Crashplan's software is free without the subscription service. It does compression and dedup, and works really well in my experience.

My motherboard refuses to mirror my drives so that seems out of the question.

You mean RAID? That's not "backup" anyway since if you accidentally delete a file, for example, it's gone.

 

[randomrogue]

Until you said it, it never dawned on me that a RAID1 is really not a backup. A pretty big oversight on my part.

I'm gonna try Acronis. Looking at my drives now my backup size is probably closer to 1.55 TB so it needs to be done right.

 

[randomrogue]

I thought I'd follow up here. I bought Acronis and it came in the mail today. Holy crap is it faster. It's also got more features than I could possibly have imagined. Definitely a huge step in the right direction. The only thing to keep in mind is that the software comes with a 220+ page instruction manual and it's probably a good idea to read a lot of it if you want to secure your data properly.

 

[Loop2kil]

Look up Cobian backup software...it's free and does the job well.
http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

 

[pcunite]

I'm looking for something simple and easy in this dept too. I'll post when I find it!

 

[Auric]

Would it not be more appropriate to simply syncronize the photos (by checksum) to the backup medium? Advantages: fastest, minimizes issues, no proprietary container, instantly accessible, and so on. If compression is desired then the OS could handle it. FreeFileSync is good and includes a component RealtimeSync.

 

[Emulex]

BESR 2010 (free trial)
norton ghost 15

both are the same technology - designed for bare metal imaging - compression - skip unused blocks - skip bad blocks, heavy compression, aes-256, smb destination (ftp too). VSS and shadow copy for good hot backups of your system.

better than acronis - in real life these programs can run for years without any issues. acronis tends to mess itself up easily and backups aren't stable.

 

[homercles337]

Windows backup does not do incremental backups. Use it to make an image/mirror, thats all its really meant to do. I use GFI for weekly, incremental backups. It does not convert data to some proprietary format, so you can "browse" your backups. Its also free for home use. I have researched this extensively and GFI is the best solution.

 

[Emulex]

maybe but BESR/norton i use it with 50+ machines and servers and it has never let me down and i restore about 1 box a month due to stupidity (uninstalling an app that has its fingers all over the system, roaching the registry,etc).

 

[ch33zw1z]

I backup my data using Create Synchronicity. I don't backup my OS anymore. Everything I have is Truecrypted with hidden partitions.

 

[George P Burdell]

+1 for Acronis. Been using it for years.

 

[hi-yield]

EASEUS Todo Backup Free is what I use.........also has many features including cloning.

They also make an excellent partitioner. Good stuff & free.:biggrin:

 

[Griffinhart]

While not the type of solution you are looking for, I am a big fan of WHS and it's backup system. Barring that...

I would personally do a weekly or monthly image of my PC using the included back up, or any other product, and an online back up service such as Carbonite, Mozy, Asus Web storage, etc.

My personal Strategy are nightly backups to a WHS machine with all my critical data being backed up to Asuswebstorage for off site data protection.

 

[Modelworks]

Macrium reflect. Fastest backup app I ever used. Doesn't install lots of junk or services and does what I tell it to without the complications.
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

 

[Chiefcrowe]

I'm a huge fan of this as well. It's served me well so far!

Macrium reflect. Fastest backup app I ever used. Doesn't install lots of junk or services and does what I tell it to without the complications.
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

 

[Venom20]

Macrium reflect. Fastest backup app I ever used. Doesn't install lots of junk or services and does what I tell it to without the complications.
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

I'm going to have to give this a whirl

 

[JimKiler]

randomrogue, get some photo minded backup software from MS called Synctoy. instead of a backup file it will copy your files to another location. I use it between my PC and NAS and it works great. you can find info easily on how to run it as a service and run it every day at 8pm for instance. I prefer this method so I can still view the images on the NAS.

Did I mention it is free?