I want to do a full or full+incremental backup of my hard drive every week or so.

In the event of a hard drive failure, I want to be able to restore my computer to the previous working condition (a week old at the most) which means i need image of the entire hard drive (about 50 gigs).

I don't want to use raid, and i have already tried ghost 9 and 10 neither of which seem to work smoothly for me. With the low cost of hard drives, I think I just need some software to do the backups at whatever time i specify...I just dont know which package to use.

What would you guys recommend for this type of backup need ?

3/2/2006 2:00:02 AM

ghost

[Edited on March 2, 2006 at 7:35 AM. Reason : 2003, I hate the newer verisons although 10 has incremental on the fly backup]

3/2/2006 7:27:47 AM

What's throwing me is you need an image of the hard drive ... not the OS/partition/files etc. Eek! I've been messing on and off with Ghost Solution Suite and am looking for a similar solution. Will get back to you if I find anything that works.

3/2/2006 7:33:06 AM

ghost solution suite is good for business needs, aka rolling out an image to everyone on your network with one keystroke. its not good (as far as i can tell) for consumer needs like mine.

3/2/2006 9:56:56 AM

ghost... BLOWS ASS CHUNKS

use acronis trueimage

3/2/2006 10:12:36 AM

ghost is great for making a complete backup of your hdd.

altho ghost 10 is kinda screwy. I'd recomend ghost 2003.

as for a differential backup, i dunno if ghost is that smart.

At work we use vertias (now symantec) backupexec. Its more of an enterprise pice of software, but you might check symantec's website to see what else they have for personal backup stuff.

Windows OneCare Live which i think is still in open beta (read free) has a backup tool that might work for you, but i haven't tried it

3/2/2006 10:28:49 AM

acronis trueimage will do what he wants, full, incremental, blah blah backups... FAST, many options, NOT BLOATED, easy to recover, etc.

3/2/2006 10:36:06 AM

ghost.exe is under a meg and its all you need to backup a system.

doesn't get much lighter than that

3/2/2006 10:38:35 AM

i tried arconis last night and it the backup ran beautifully. i need to restore the image to a spare drive before i can say im 100% about it, but it looks good.

and i love ghost for system reployment uses, but its an enterprise application. their consumer version (read: powerquest shit rebranded) is crap. i've tried setting up automatic backups with both 9 and 10 and all i get is error messages.

and yeah, i can use ghost enterprise to image my drive, but that involves bootable floppies etc. much more work than a windows based backup app.

and in this the age of gigs or ram and seemingly limitless hard disk storage, how small an app is how much system resources it consumes (to a point) doesnt much matter anymore

[Edited on March 2, 2006 at 12:23 PM. Reason : ]

3/2/2006 12:22:28 PM

I use RAID 0+1.

3/2/2006 3:09:43 PM

Raid is your best option.


Mirroring is at a lower level than any software solution, so it's going to be more reliable.

[Edited on March 2, 2006 at 3:49 PM. Reason : I'm pretty sure.]

3/2/2006 3:49:33 PM

if you want a windows based backup solution, whats wrong with ntbackup?

3/2/2006 5:37:21 PM

1 vote for Paragon Hard Disk Manager, if you can afford it.

3/2/2006 7:10:30 PM

Quote :

" Raid is your best option."

if you fuck up the data portion of the drive and don't have a REAL backup, i.e. not a real-time backup you get with raid mirroring, you're fucked.

[Edited on March 2, 2006 at 7:15 PM. Reason : ]

3/2/2006 7:13:43 PM

^
That's great you know what a Raid mirror is good for, bous, but he's looking for a solution IN CASE OF DRIVE FAILURE, not in case a virus fucks up his shit.

Quote :

"In the event of a hard drive failure, I want to be able to restore my computer to the previous working condition"

3/2/2006 7:46:49 PM

but in case of that scenario which is the only time i've ever had data trouble, he's fucked.

so software backup program is his best solution here imo.

[Edited on March 2, 2006 at 10:32 PM. Reason : ]

3/2/2006 10:31:16 PM

I've used RAID before...and thats not the way i wanted to go. I also want to be able to restore from OS related problems. While the RAID would be nice in theory, and i might do that someday, I want something software based so I can have an image of the drive at various points...and once I have that image I can store on the network or even off site.

Arconis seems to be what I was looking for, I'll restore from an image this weekend to confirm it totally works.

Quote :

"but in case of that scenario which is the only time i've ever had data trouble"

yeah I've had OS problems a few times and rebuilding my PC is a bitch. Starting from clean is good, but I want to be able to plan some time for that and respond to signifigant OS/Drive problems quickly.

3/3/2006 9:44:18 AM

been using rsync to do snapshot style backups for years.

This covers most of it: http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

Backuppc is pretty good too.

3/3/2006 7:26:01 PM

do you guys have any recommendations for backing up a few Windows folders to a remote host over SSH or SFTP?

My webhost gives us a ginormous amount of storage (right now, 22GB) and as of now I'm using about 45MB So I figured I should take advantage of what I'm paying for and backup some of my critical directories (like My Documents, etc) to this host. I'd like to be able to use some sort of incremental backups, for it would be pointless to upload 7GB of data spread over 15,000+ files every night.

I've googled and found some not-so-free ways of doing this, but that were fairly cheap had any kind of auto-synchronize feature that would take care of things for me in the middle of the night.

Is rsync a good option? I haven't done much research on this one yet except read the link in the previous post, but if it's a good option, I could set something up in the task scheduler. I've always stayed away from command-line programs because I tend to screw them up But if this does incremental stuff over SSH/SFTP, it may just be a winner.

Thanks

3/30/2006 11:20:46 PM

A program I'm using right now: Cobian Backup

Free, and I haven't seen any problems with it yet.

http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

[Edited on March 31, 2006 at 9:51 AM. Reason : link]

3/31/2006 9:49:33 AM

I have a RAID question that i think i already know the answer to, but want to get confirmation.

I have my main HDD on my mac mini, but i bought a 200GB external drive I use for media and have a partition that is a clone/backup of the main drive. I didn't know before I bought it, but the external drive is loud as hell - it sounds like a frikkin helicopter taking off. Therefore, I really try not to use it that much - i watch downloaded TV on my main drive, then move it to the external for permanent storage, have scheduled backups when i'm not home, etc.
But i'm not very happy with the backup solutions I've tried, and thought RAID would be an easy way to keep the drives synced. So my question is with the way mirrored RAID works, whenever one drive is accessed, is the other also accessed and written in real time? If I set up a RAID 1, will my external HDD fire up everytime the primary one is accessed? Is there any way to set up a "semi-RAID" where the drives aren't synced in real time, but in batches or something? Or am I just describing a software backup/sync program.....

3/31/2006 10:02:45 AM

I screwed around with rsync, and it looks like it's a pretty good way of keeping my backup folders up to date. It looks like a pretty powerful program, and completely supports SSH which is what I was wanting.

So I'm using it and pyCron to run a small script calling rsync every night at 3am, and hopefully it will work out for me for a long time to come.

4/1/2006 12:20:24 PM