tag:ask-leo.com,2011://3/tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102- 2011-11-22T22:50:13Z Comments for So what should I backup? Movable Type 4.32-en tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:55689 Comment from Murray on 2011-04-02 Murray http://unspecified I, like you, have Acronis so I tried to set up my back ups the same as you described. I do have a question however. When you set up the monthly full back up, is it set to the same file as the Incremental back ups? That is, does the monthly back up just overwrite the previous full months back up and its incremental back ups?
thank you
Murray
Essentially, yes. I do archive the initial monthly full backup for long term storage / archival.
Leo
06-Apr-2011

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 2011-04-02T19:12:05Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:40035 Comment from Robin Clay on 2009-11-17 Robin Clay You wrote, "you should never backup to the same hard drive that you're backing up."

I'm inclined to the view that you don't emphasize enough that the back-up should be under a separate ROOF, not just on a separate drive...

I know YOU do it ;-)

I totally agree, however given the number of people who don't backup at all, and the number of problems that would be resolved by a backup, even if an external drive sitting next to the same machine, I'm happy if I can get people to do that much. Smile
Leo
18-Nov-2009

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 2009-11-17T20:49:05Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:37590 Comment from Bob on 2009-09-01 Bob I made a mistake when I had my main 500GB hard drive partitioned with a dual boot XP/Vista setup. They are C(Vista) and F(XP), each taking 30GB's, and 2 more partitions, D and E, taking up the remainder of the 500GB space.

I want to back up and clean up the C drive because it keeps losing GB space every day for some reason, even though I NEVER DOWNLOAD OR SAVE ANYTHING TO THE C DRIVE/PARTITION, and now I am down to 2 GB free space available on the C drive(Vista) operating system. I can reclaim 2-3 gigs by defragging every other day but I still lose multiple megs of space daily anyway. It seems the "Windows" folder keeps having folders and info added to it regardless of where I put stuff. Why does that happen?

I never use the F(XP) system at all, so that's 30GB that I could use for my C drive and it is sitting useless! I would like to recapture at least that space for the C drive. Is reformating the only way it can happen?

My question is, if I backed up everything and reinstalled Vista on the 500GB disk, will the other partitons automatically get lumped in as partitions with the C backup when I brought them back to the new partiton since they are already partitoned with drive letters from the original 500 GB hard drive allocation?

I have 2 external HD's, one 320GB and one 250GB, so either would accept either the D or the E drive info as well as the C back up, so I can move them over as partitions. I'm just wondering if there is a simpler or more efficient way to salvage all that data without reformating everything.

Any advice?

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 2009-09-01T19:38:26Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:35185 Comment from Lyn on 2009-06-17 Lyn Hi Leo
Is copying my files to an external drive the same as backing up files to an external drive? If there is a difference, I would be very interested in an explanation.

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 2009-06-17T14:40:35Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:29725 Comment from Richard on 2009-05-08 Richard http://unspecified Thank you Leo.

I have been having problems, with my Dell 1520 laptop, that may or may not be the HDD. I did not want to wait to see if I was right. So I went yesterday (after reading your article) and bought Acronis and a 500GB Western-Digital MyBook external HDD (about $140US in all at BestBuy). Then I went straight home and backed up everything in my computer; settings, both users accounts, and the OS.

Thank you for the well written article.

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 2009-05-08T09:23:42Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:29724 Comment from Joe on 2009-03-08 Joe http://unspecified Leo, maybe a stupid question but how hasn't your 250GB external drive filled up by now? Every month do you delete the previous month's incremental backups in order to free up space, or do you literally still have every single incremental backup going back all the way to the beginning of when you started doing this?

I'm a little confused because in another post you said backing up your machine took around 40GB. So it wouldn't take many months to use up the entire 250GB external drive.

Actually my monthly full backups are now around 80gig, and my every-other-night incrementals are between 1 and 14 gig, depending on how busy I've been.

You can see since writing the article I've switched to every-other-night incrementals, because I would fill up the external drive in less than a month.

I save each months full backup for "a while" by copying it to other storage I have here, and "a while" varies depending on available disk storage. Ultimately I've never had to go back more than a few days, so most of my older saved copies are likely not needed at all.

Each months incremental backups automatically overwrite the incrementals from the previous month.

- Leo
09-Mar-2009

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 2009-03-08T19:50:16Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:29723 Comment from Leo A. Notenboom on 2007-09-05 Leo A. Notenboom -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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Acronis is a one time purchase.

Leo


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 2007-09-06T04:40:05Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:29722 Comment from bonnie Becker on 2007-09-05 bonnie Becker You did not mention the cost of Acronis True Image 10. Is it a one time purchase or a monthly fee as long as you use it?

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 2007-09-06T03:04:09Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:29721 Comment from teresa hanks on 2007-08-26 teresa hanks what about norton ghost. i got a triak with my dell and had to one restore and it came up. can i delete it or is it good to keep on the computer in case of crash?

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 2007-08-27T04:51:38Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:29720 Comment from Michael Horowitz on 2007-08-05 Michael Horowitz http://unspecified Two comments about Acronis True Image.

(1) It is NOT A TRUE image, at least not the last time I checked (and I checked multiple versions of the product). By this I mean that unlike a real image backup, it does not backup all hard disk sectors but instead only backs up sectors that Windows thinks have files on them. This means that if the file system gets screwed up, the backups are useless. I also think it skips things like the page/swap file and the hibernation file. While these two files can be safely skipped, once you start skipping anything, you open yourself up to making a mistake.

(2) True Image is a Windows application and I don't like the idea of backing up an OS from the inside while it's running. I much prefer to backup Windows from outside the OS with a disk image program that runs off a bootable CD.

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 2007-08-05T18:32:16Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:29719 Comment from Leo A. Notenboom on 2007-08-05 Leo A. Notenboom -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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David: Offsite backup services like Mozy and others are too new for me to feel
comfortable recommending. There are privacy and reliability concerns, as well
as some operational concerns (see
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13554_1-9752330-33.html for an argument against).

Personally, I don't want yet-another-application using up my limitted internet
bandwidth. I realize that they probably do a very good job of scheduling or
throttling uploads, but the bottom line is that those gigabytes all have to go
up your internet connection somehow, sometime. I can't see how that wouldn't
conflict at least occasionally with my own use of my internet connection.

So I'm not really arguing against - there's a lot to be said for the approach.
I'm just not ready to say yes to it.

Leo

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 2007-08-05T15:14:23Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:29718 Comment from Ken Crook on 2007-08-04 Ken Crook http://unspecified I also use Acronis TrueImage to create and image of my entire C: drive twice a month. So if I have a failure I can quickly return back to the way things where, in about 1-Hour. I have done the format/reinstall everything nightmare before, which in between working, took a week to get everything installed, updated, and reset back to the way I like things. Acronis TrueImage is the best way to go.
Also, whenever I create or change an important file I immediately back it up to a USB pen drive.
And once a month I copy my MyDocuments folder, where I keep all my files, to 2-CD's and keep that at another location. So if my computer died I can just copy the MyDocuments folder onto the new computer and not loose anything.

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 2007-08-05T03:30:13Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:29717 Comment from David Heym on 2007-08-03 David Heym Why did you not suggest an off site backup service, such as Mozy. 2 gb is free. I backup about 15 gb which by encoding is reduced to about 1.6 gb. It runs once a week and takes about 30 minutes. I realize I'm only backing my data and not the operating system, so in case of trouble it will be trouble. I probably should backup the whole thing and pay the freight.

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 2007-08-04T02:03:49Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:29716 Comment from Chris on 2007-08-01 Chris You can restore the FULL backup to anywhere you like. It doesn't matter if it's the same drive on the same PC or a different drive on a different PC. What does matter is the chipset on the motherboard.
If you were to try restoring on a machine with a different chipset, you will get the blue screen of death on boot up. Same chipset, you get a full boot up and no problems. Any other driver that wasn't installed before would get recognized and changed on the spot.

If you were get a blue screen of death, simply pop in your Windows CD and do a repair install. You will keep your old registry and files so you lose nothing, but now, windows is configured on your new chipset from fresh.

That's it. Hope this helps.

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 2007-08-01T17:26:30Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:29715 Comment from Leo A. Notenboom on 2007-07-31 Leo A. Notenboom -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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Not a stupid question at all, and you raise a good issue.

If you simply repair or replace a broken hard drive, then restoring a full
backup to your machine typically works. But as you point out, if you move to a
completely different machine, then things get confused.

If the machine is "similar" enough (whatever that might mean), then there's a
possibility that the restore would actually work. You *might* need to
re-activate (which should fix the WGA issue you raise). Worse case you would
need to reactivate over the phone, which I've heard actually goes pretty
smoothly.

More typically, though, if the problem is that catastrophic that the entire
machine gets swapped out, what most folks do is go the reinstallation route,
reinstalling Windows and applications to the new machine. The backup is then
used to recover data and other files from the old system.

Leo

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 2007-07-31T19:43:18Z tag:ask-leo.com,2007://3.3102-comment:29714 Comment from Mary on 2007-07-31 Mary http://unspecified Stupid question of the day because I'm confused. If the entire C: drive is backed up (including operating system), wouldn't this also include drivers, registry, etc. that are unique to the machine being backed up? So if that machine died and you put your backup on a different machine or even a different hard drive on the same machine, would you introduce problems? How would Windows Genuine Advantage react when the machine specific security hashes don't match up? Or am I missing something really basic? (Which happens more and more frequently as I get older!)

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 2007-07-31T18:28:12Z