Nancy said:
I am using backup wizard, trying to set up a scheduled job. I want it to
do
a full backup (type=normal) the first time, then incremental backups after
that. So I set up a scheduled job. But I can't figure out how to change
it,
only create a new scheduled job, and therefore I can't change the type of
backup. Any advice?
You are using the MS Backup? You are trying to do a full backup of the
entire drive?
I ask because that particular task is fairly pointless; it will take a lot
of time and space, and will not give you a really usable backup. There
will be a huge amount of space occupied by stuff that would, in the event
you needed to restore, be of no value. And the size of a full-drive backup
can easily make verification cumbersome.
I'd suggest that if you want to us MS Backup, you instead identify the data
that you need, and back up just that. This will take considerably less
time and space, and be much easier to verify.
You might want to consider backup programs that don't use proprietary file
formats, like Backup Plus. This creates a file named .bac, but it's really
a ZIP file. ZIP is widely understood and there are many repair and
recovery utilities should the backups corrupt. It has a scheduler.
If you do want to do a full backup of the drive, and there are very good
reasons to do this, use imaging software, not backup software. Imaging
will give you a backup that, should you have to restore from it, will
provide a bootable drive. In the event of hard disk failure, you can get
a working and up-to-date system in under an hour. I regularly make images
in 20 minutes or so.
I've had good results with Acronis True Image, which also has a scheduler,
and you can test this with the 15-day demo version. It's not expensive.
Other versions include Ghost and Drive Image.
But no matter how you back up, no matter what software you use, you must
verify the backups.
HTH
-pk
