Backing up Win 10 PC

ChrisR

ChrisR

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We have a family PC running up to date Win 10. I've always had trouble with backing up Windows machines (I have a MacBook Pro myself and Time Machine works a treat, I have backups in two different locations we visit regularly). My current Win 10 backup solution is to use CrashPlan for Small Business, backing up to their cloud site and also to a local hard drive. I decided having the cloud backup as well would be useful in case we ever get infected with ransomware, which would presumably encrypt the attached hard drive as well.

I've recently got a bit worried as AFAIK CrashPlan only backs up user files. So if I get a fatal crash on the PC disk, I think I'd be in trouble. I thought this was OK, as I could presumably re-install from MS etc, but over time there gets to be more and more stuff on there, and it could be a fair bit of trouble!

The backup disk is 1 TB, of which some 800 GB are still available (looks like CrashPlan doesn't keep deleted files or old versions), so presumably I could do a full backup onto there ...

Any recommendations?

PS not hugely happy with CrashPlan; it has two parts on the PC that frequently get disconnected, which you only find out about 3 days later when they send an alert email! I was interested in BackBlaze, which appears to be very fast and half the price, but then reviews suggested that actually getting your files back was a PITA, and that they have poor customer service. Review sites list a few others, but the recommendations differ greatly and some are really not cheap. Do maybe CP isn't so bad, at $10 per month!
 
Have you had a look at Acronis?
Can be Cloud-based as well as local ... it creates an image of the drive(s) selected to enable a complete restore of the system to the state it was when it was imaged. Incremental or Differential, scheduled, verified and has saved my bacon several times.
 
gramps said:
Have you had a look at Acronis?
Can be Cloud-based as well as local ... it creates an image of the drive(s) selected to enable a complete restore of the system to the state it was when it was imaged. Incremental or Differential, scheduled, verified and has saved my bacon several times.
Click to expand...

Acronis is on offer at £25.00 for one computer at the moment, its literally set it up and forget it.

https://www.acronis.com/en-gb/personal/buy-backup/
 
gramps said:
Have you had a look at Acronis?
Can be Cloud-based as well as local ... it creates an image of the drive(s) selected to enable a complete restore of the system to the state it was when it was imaged. Incremental or Differential, scheduled, verified and has saved my bacon several times.
Click to expand...

I hadn't looked at Acronis before...

troutfisher said:
Acronis is on offer at £25.00 for one computer at the moment, its literally set it up and forget it.

https://www.acronis.com/en-gb/personal/buy-backup/
Click to expand...

So that must be just an image backup to a local hard disk, I think?

I'm not quite getting how the incremental and differential bits relate to an image backup... unless it first makes an image, and then does a file-based backup, to use as a base for incremental/differential backups?
 
ChrisR said:
I'm not quite getting how the incremental and differential bits relate to an image backup... unless it first makes an image, and then does a file-based backup, to use as a base for incremental/differential backups?
Click to expand...

An incremental backup contains all changes that have been made since the latest incremental or full backup was created. If one full backup and several incremental were created, all of these backups must be saved in the same folder so that you will be able to restore the data. If one of incremental backups or a full backup is deleted, there is no way to restore the set, since all backups are dependent on each other.
Click to expand...

Cloud backup is an extra option.
 
I am a crash plan user looking for an alternative and have been recommended https://www.duplicati.com/. Not yet made the switch though as I have quite as lot of data on a single machine which makes Crash plan good value.
Also been recorded urBackup but haven't investigated as that is a Windows only tool.
 
Macrium Reflect is my choice.
 
It was going really well with only one backup system recommended ;) !!!

Thanks for the suggestions, folks.

Back to my original issue... is there a standard way of making an image backup using tools that would already be on the Win 10 system? I appreciate that if I went with Acronis/cloud I probably wouldn't need to, but just in case I stuck with CPfSB...
 
ChrisR said:
I hadn't looked at Acronis before...

So that must be just an image backup to a local hard disk, I think?

I'm not quite getting how the incremental and differential bits relate to an image backup... unless it first makes an image, and then does a file-based backup, to use as a base for incremental/differential backups?
Click to expand...
I use Acronis True Image to back up to my NAS. On the first of the month it creates a full image then, on subsequent nights, it creates smaller differential files. So, yes, exactly how you thought. At the end of the month a batch file moves them all to a folder and the process stats again for the next month. (The batch file also deletes folders over six months old so the NAS doesn't fill up with stale backups.)
 
Coincidentally I had a major malfunction on my laptop last night (user error!) and had to completely restore my Acronis backup this morning. Thankfully all up and running now with everything as it was ... phew!!!
 
a different approach would be a synology NAS or something similar, 2 or more drives in RAID config gives a layer of protection, then plug an external drive into the NAS and use bundled software to back up the NAS to that, then use amazon prine (if you have it) to back up photos stored on the NAS to the cloud (unlimited free storage), and use the free storage from microsoft/dropbox etc to back up data files.

multiple layers of protection, your own personal server and a simplified PC upgrade when the time comes
 
flook999 said:
a different approach would be a synology NAS or something similar, 2 or more drives in RAID config gives a layer of protection, then plug an external drive into the NAS and use bundled software to back up the NAS to that, then use amazon prine (if you have it) to back up photos stored on the NAS to the cloud (unlimited free storage), and use the free storage from microsoft/dropbox etc to back up data files.

multiple layers of protection, your own personal server and a simplified PC upgrade when the time comes
Click to expand...
That's nice but a significantly more expensive and technical solution... and we don't have Prime, either!
 
Probably not suitable for you, but my method involves having data and operating system kept on separate drives. It simplifies things for me. My OS is on a 250GB Samsung SSD. Samsung provide a very useful piece of software intended to help you move your OS from a conventional drive to one of their SSDs. In practice, all you need is a connector to attach the SSD to a USB port, and the software creates a clone of the OS on the new SSD. Hence, easy to make a backup, that, if the need arose, could simply be swapped for the failed OS drive. And the software only cares about the destination being a Samsung SSD - what drive your OS is on doesn't matter. This does have the result that after the first failure, you're committed to using a Samsung SSD as the boot drive...

Data is a different story. I'm semi paranoid. I have a RAID system on my desktop computer, and mirror the data every couple of hours (automatically) to a couple of RAID NAS boxes. Plus a backup as well (to keep deleted files). Plus three external USB disks... The software I use was recommended to me on another forum years ago: SyncBack. It comes as a free and a paid for version, lets you choose mirror or backup, set times to run etc. I'm running the paid version which lets you backup to both GoogleDrive and Microsoft OneDrive (and probably others - I only use those two).
 
I don't know why but the over the last week or so this whole backup thing has been on my mind

I also run Windows 10 but I currently just use the WD backup software and that just takes a backup of everything on my 3tb internal drive but I've got nothing backing up my 250gb SSD (which only has the OS and programs on) I always thought "this will do"

The thing that annoys me is every couple of month I have to delete the back up and start it as a fresh back up, this is due to the fact that it backs up everything then when I get round to culling from shoots then editing its already backed up the stuff I don't really need so the back up is far bigger than what's actually on my hard drive.

I might be thinking about this the wrong way but is it a raid set up id need to take a copy of everything and if I delete the next back up will know that certain files have been deleted???

Any advice
 
A RAID set up (as I use it) is simply a way of treating more than one drive as a single entity, and ensuring that both (in the case of my desktop system) drives hold exactly the same data, so that if one fails, I have a guaranteed duplicate. On my RAID card, I can go one step further, and I have a third disk attached that the system will automatically use to rebuild the system if one disk fails. Edit to add: the three physical disks in my desktop appear as one drive letter.

When making an external system copy, SyncBack (I assume others use the same terminology) offers either a backup (copy all new and changed files) or a mirror (copy all new and changed files, delete any that have been deleted from the original). In practice, I both mirror and backup to separate RAID NAS boxes (and simple USB external disks). And yes, the backup disks have a lot more on them than the mirrors.
 
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An important issue is confidence in backup and restore. I use a NAS for my primary backup and a version of Acronis regularly saves an image copy of the C: drive. My data is stored on a larger D: drive and I use the excellent backup facility with my Anti-Virus package Bullguard. This allows me to choose the backup frequency of various folders. So I backup my Outlook pst file (emails, diary and contacts) every day. My routine documents (Word, Excel , Access etc) are backed up weekly. My image files are backed up monthly. Of course there is a risk of losing some data should something go wrong between backups. However, I actually create a temporary backup of all imported Raw files so that should something happen, I can always at least recover the raw file. I also have a few other backup copies as well.

For me the key issue is that for two periods in the last 8 years, I had a frequently failing C: drive. In the first case it turned out to be a physical problem with the drive which I eventually replaced. In the second case, it was a Windows update failure which I eventually identified to be caused by an old App which I knew little about but once deleted all was well. Over these difficult periods I was havening to restore the C: drive frequently using Acronis which never let me down.

Dave
 
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