Backups

[Icerat]

Hi guys

After some thinking i thought it was about time i got my self into a
good backup routine (something I've never done before), I've got
hundreds of photos of our new baby and lots of documents and stuff I've
created i want to keep.

So i started to look around for some free backup software and came
across Cobian Backup 7 http://www.cobian.se/

It's nice and easy to use and backs every thing up into is own store
archive (zip).
After each time i run it i get 10 achieves with what i've asked it to
back up stored in them i.e. separate achieve for Photos, one for docs,
oine for manual backups i do first (Mozbackup, Thunderbird and Firefox)
ect. ect.

At the moment I'm just doing full back up one a week and burning that to
a new DVDRW that is only ever going to be used for backups. I usually
just copy the files created buy the software to a new folder on the disk
(multi session so i can keep adding folders).

On the disk at the moment there are five folders with the following
names (each folder contains about 800mb of data):

BK 02-12-05
BK 09-12-05
BK 16-12-05
BK 23-12-05
BK 30-12-05

Now as you can imagine creating a full backup each time takes up allot
of space, so i have a few questions:

1. I know there are a couple of types of backups (incremental
differential) but what are they? and what's the difference?
2. Is this the best way to back up my data?
3. Is there a more efficient way of doing this?
4. Is the software I'm using any good? ( I liked the idea of the
individual things I backed up being stored in there own archive). Keeps
everything nice and organised.

If anyone has any ideas on how i can improve this or recommend any other
software it would be great.

Many thanks in advance

Mike

 

[Phillips]

I gave up on DVDRW long time ago; I use additional hard-drives for backup
purposes. You can do it either via internal or external hard-drives - they
are safer than DVDRW's, cheaper per MB... and you know where they are
located
Second, I don't use 'backup' software since it might be unreliable -
transfering to other computers, for ex; simply Copy and Paste would do or
you can use either an imaging program (Acronis) to make incremental images
of modified folders; easier and free (as price of purchase) are MS SyncToy
which you can schedule via Scheduler or one of Kareen's Toys (google for
it). There are some nice file management utilities (DOpus, for ex) that have
a synchronization application included. On a networked drive, you can use
Windows Explorer Synchronization feature.
Michael