Back up scheme

[Jimquist]

I recently purchased a 250 GB, USB 2.0, external hard drive by SimpleTech.
Using their software and selecting to b/u my entire C drive, it takes over 8
hours to copy approx 24 GB. It takes about the same time to do an
incremental backup.
That seems to be an excessive amount of time. (2.4 Celeron)
I have found that the backup utility (ntbackup) that came with my XP Home,
seems to do a superb job and MUCH quicker. Selecting only my "working"
files that MUST be preserved, I have only about 8 GB in my backup set. If I
backup to a file, it requires only 22 minutes to backup to the external
disc. By backing up to a file, I can keep about 25 separate backups, thus
allowing recovery of a file version that precedes a current file with a big
error in it that was made several weeks ago and saved several times since.
Sorry for being so long winded, but I'm just wondering if there is any
problem with this scheme that I haven't seen. Would hate to get 3 or 4
months down the road and find a shortcoming when I really needed to restore
some files.
Thanks for any comments........ Jim

 

[Jeff]

Most folks agree Acronis True Image is the best way to backup. Just lay out
the $$ for it, sooner or later you won't regret it. I believe they have 30
free trial. I have used it to restore a system after a disk crash. It
copies to my external hard drive about 1Gbyte/minute and is smart enough not
to copy things like the page file, etc. Each backup is stored as one file,
you can make several of these until you fill the backup drive. You also can
"open" these files with Acronis to copy anything you might need.

 

[Rock]

I recently purchased a 250 GB, USB 2.0, external hard drive by SimpleTech.
Using their software and selecting to b/u my entire C drive, it takes over
8 hours to copy approx 24 GB. It takes about the same time to do an
incremental backup.
That seems to be an excessive amount of time. (2.4 Celeron)
I have found that the backup utility (ntbackup) that came with my XP Home,
seems to do a superb job and MUCH quicker. Selecting only my "working"
files that MUST be preserved, I have only about 8 GB in my backup set. If
I backup to a file, it requires only 22 minutes to backup to the external
disc. By backing up to a file, I can keep about 25 separate backups, thus
allowing recovery of a file version that precedes a current file with a
big error in it that was made several weeks ago and saved several times
since.
Sorry for being so long winded, but I'm just wondering if there is any
problem with this scheme that I haven't seen. Would hate to get 3 or 4
months down the road and find a shortcoming when I really needed to
restore some files.

I am not familiar with the backup software from Simple Tech so I cannot
comment on that.

Ntbackup should work fine as you have described it. What this scheme
doesn't do is give a way to recover the complete installation if something
should damage it, say the hard drive dies, or malware damages it to the
point it can't be recovered. Now you're in for an install of the OS, then
updating it, then installing the applications, then restoring the data from
backup.

One option to handle this is use a drive imaging program such as Acronis
True Image 10. It will create a compressed image of the drive which can be
stored on the external USB drive. Subsequent images can be done as
increments to the original so you could run a full system image once a week
and an incremental every night. ATI also can do file backups, and for image
backups files can be restored individually. Most people are very happy with
ATI.

They do offer a 30 day full featured trial version downloadable from their
web site. The price when bought from Acronis is $49.99. Newegg.com has it
right now at $34.99.

As an aside: it's interesting that Newegg.com's price is jumping around
quite a bit. Over the last week it has gone from a low of $26.99 USD up to
$39.99, down to $29.99 and when I just checked a moment ago, it's up to
$34.99.

In any event you might consider ATI as an option.

 

[Jonny]

I recently purchased a 250 GB, USB 2.0, external hard drive by SimpleTech.
Using their software and selecting to b/u my entire C drive, it takes over
8 hours to copy approx 24 GB. It takes about the same time to do an
incremental backup.
That seems to be an excessive amount of time. (2.4 Celeron)
I have found that the backup utility (ntbackup) that came with my XP Home,
seems to do a superb job and MUCH quicker. Selecting only my "working"
files that MUST be preserved, I have only about 8 GB in my backup set. If
I backup to a file, it requires only 22 minutes to backup to the external
disc. By backing up to a file, I can keep about 25 separate backups, thus
allowing recovery of a file version that precedes a current file with a
big error in it that was made several weeks ago and saved several times
since.
Sorry for being so long winded, but I'm just wondering if there is any
problem with this scheme that I haven't seen. Would hate to get 3 or 4
months down the road and find a shortcoming when I really needed to
restore some files.
Thanks for any comments........ Jim

If that SimpleTech software is what I think it is, your full backup of C:
drive is not the horse you think it is. It cannot copy open windows files.
There is no compression, and copies the files as is/verbatim.

3GB an hour is way to slow for copying or imaging a partition. Something is
crippled here.

I do 2 forms of backup, one of my personal files like you're speaking of
with ntbackup. I do this real time/same file with the 3rd party application
(not ntbackup) to other media.
The other form of backup is imaging the entire partition regularly every
week. Each week's worth is saved to an image file with its own folder on a
removable hard drive. Examples: week1, week2, week3, week4, week5.

Ntbackup works as is in its own version of the operating system that it came
with. Just don't try restoring personal files in another version of
windows, it won't work. This has been an unpleasant surprise for many
people.

 

[Jimquist]

Thank you for your thoughts. I should have remembered that using the backup
utility that comes with a particular version of Windows works only with that
WIN o/s. I got caught with that when changed from '98 to XP.
In my 15 years on a PC I've never had a disc failure, so I'm long over due.
Guess I need to go the additional step and get ATI.
Thanks again......... Jim

 

[Rock]

Thank you for your thoughts. I should have remembered that using the
backup utility that comes with a particular version of Windows works only
with that WIN o/s. I got caught with that when changed from '98 to XP.
In my 15 years on a PC I've never had a disc failure, so I'm long over
due.
Guess I need to go the additional step and get ATI.
Thanks again......... Jim

MS has just released a new utility to allow Vista to read backup files
created under ntbackup in XP.