What backup software do you use?

[dmcantrell]

After a recent hard-drive failure experience, I am in the market for a new backup software package.

I was using Norton Ghost 10.0, but this software had some limitations that made it very inefficient and difficult to use.
* Files saved as proprietary format, had to use Norton Ghost to read them
* Seemed to be pretty slow when I had to use it to recover files, took ~48 hours to restore ~70GB from USB drives
* The boot disk capability did not work for me due to my motherboard's disk controllers

I was going to get the Acronis 2010 True Image software, but it has terrible reviews on newegg (link).

What do you all use?

[Flea77]

I have Acronis on many machines, my personal, my wife's, several customers, and have yet to have a problem (knock on wood). Never had a machine it did not work on as long as the machine was in good condition (if the hard drive controller goes out, it is not the fault of the imaging software that you can't restore an image). I have used it with great success for almost four years and would not hesitate to install it on more machines.

Allan

[dmcantrell]

Hrm, interesting. Everywhere I read the Acronis gets rave reviews. I wonder why the newegg reviews are so terrible.

So have you actually had to use one of the backed up images (from Acronis) to restore a disk? I'm particularly gunshy on this issue due to some real headaches I had to overcome this week. I thought Norton Ghost was great until I actually had to use it for recovery...

[revjvegas]

SyncBack is simplistic and free, but offers no compression.

Just tossing it out there.

2BrightSparks | Downloads

[billbunton]

I use Time Machine and Super Duper (and Dropbox for quite a bit of my stuff). But that probably doesn't help you (except maybe Dropbox) because it sounds like you're on a PC :-)

[Peacock]

Have you checked Carbonite out? What are you trying to backup your files or create a system image?

[texxter]

I use Acronis for the drive with the OS and apps. For images and other data I use Second Copy from an eSata array to another drive, either eSATA or USB. I have two identical copies of all my files online at all times. Once a year I buy a drive, make a copy of the images for the year, label it and put it away for archival purposes.

[hhscr]

syncback here also, easy to use and has been very stable for me.

[srwatters]

I'm with Bill. TimeMachine, DropBox, & iDisk. SuperDuper for disaster recovery on the OS partition.

[Kalrog]

I use CrashPlan CrashPlan - Automatic Online Backup

Full clients for Linux/PC/Mac and it allows you the best of both worlds - a local backup to an external HD for speed. Then take it to a friend's house and you also can do an off site backup. No charge for any of this, unless you want to upgrade the software or let them do the backup storage in their cloud.

[dmcantrell]

Originally Posted by Peacock

Have you checked Carbonite out? What are you trying to backup your files or create a system image?

I haven't checked out Carbonite yet, but I will now.

Here's what I'm trying to do :

1) make scheduled backups of my data (non O/S files)

2) make a copy of my boot drive (image I guess?) so that I can easily recover it in the event of a drive failure. When I say "easily" I mean "copy some stuff and be running again" and not "reinstall my O/S and all of the piddly little system files and drivers over the course of three days to get back to where I was before the drive failure".

Thanks for the replies so far, this is helpful.

[dryicerx]

daily cron job to incremental (full weekly) tar, gz, gpg, then rsync to local file server
also weekly s3cmd to upload to amazon s3

note: days I work with photos a lot (not every day), I usually skip the compression and gpg, not really necessary

[Flea77]

Originally Posted by dmcantrell

Hrm, interesting. Everywhere I read the Acronis gets rave reviews. I wonder why the newegg reviews are so terrible.

So have you actually had to use one of the backed up images (from Acronis) to restore a disk? I'm particularly gunshy on this issue due to some real headaches I had to overcome this week. I thought Norton Ghost was great until I actually had to use it for recovery...

Yes, I have used it for recovery, and for HDD upgrades, OS upgrades, always works fine.

I would suspect after reading a few of the Newegg reviews that people are not testing the hardware before doing a restore. As I stated in my first post, if your HDD stops working, you put in a new drive and start a restore and it fails, did it ever occur to the guys on Newegg it may not be a failed drive but a failed controller instead? How about another device on the controller that is misbehaving? So many things could be wrong and none of it would be Acronis' fault.

Allan

[dmcantrell]

Originally Posted by Flea77

Yes, I have used it for recovery, and for HDD upgrades, OS upgrades, always works fine.

I would suspect after reading a few of the Newegg reviews that people are not testing the hardware before doing a restore. As I stated in my first post, if your HDD stops working, you put in a new drive and start a restore and it fails, did it ever occur to the guys on Newegg it may not be a failed drive but a failed controller instead? How about another device on the controller that is misbehaving? So many things could be wrong and none of it would be Acronis' fault.

Allan

Thanks so much. I'm going to consider the terrible reviews on newegg an "outlier" and go with the Acronis. They have a good deal on it right now -- $18.99 after rebate.

Thanks for all the help!

[johnstodd]

If you have a second drive with enough space to hold "My Documents" for example...

set bkupdrive=F
robocopy "C:\My Documents" "%bkupdrive%:\My Documents" /mir

The first time this will run for a while depending on how much space your My Documents is using. After the first time, only changes, adds, deletes are processed and only takes a few seconds. It's not a full image backup but it does a great job of keeping an exact copy of My Documents on your backup drive (for example). To restore...just drag and drop.

Once a year, I restore my computer using the original disk and then restore My Documents from my backup drive. A great way to clean off a year's worth of junk and start clean again.

Just my way of doing it. It's free.