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July 27th, 2008 20:00
Backup programs
I have a Western Digital My Book external drive-USB that I will be using to back up my documents, pictures, etc. It came with a backup program called Memeo AutoBackup which you have to buy-a 30 day free trial. Does anyone who is using this or other backup programs make any recommendations? I haven't used a backup program before so I want to have a good one, maybe one that can also image my drive.
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fireberd
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July 27th, 2008 22:00
Many of us on the forum use Acronis True Image for backups. You can make full backups, incremental backups (that I do not recommend), clone the hard drive, etc.
I use Acronis True Image (V11 is current version) and backup my entire hard drive including the two Dell recovery and diagnostic partitions on my Dimension E510. I've had to rebuild my hard drive a couple of times (due to my testing) and no problem with restoring. It will work with internal or externally connected drives.
Acronis
Annie70
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July 29th, 2008 11:00
Fireberd, Thanks for your recommendation. I see this program cost is around $50.00. That is OK if it works well and there are no charges for updates. How is the learning curve for this program? Can you use it on more than one computer-for instance my desktop and laptop?
May I ask why you do not recomend incremental backups?-
Larry R
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July 29th, 2008 17:00
Full backups are everything in one shot, but the drawback is it can take a while to create the backup because of that. Incremental backups only save stuff that has changed since the last full (or incremental) backup, making them much faster to create. The drawback of using the incrementals is that when you need to do a recovery you much load the latest full backup, and then load all incremental backups since the full backup, in order to get a full recovery.
If your dataset is small enough, or you aren't worried about the time it takes to create them, you might as well just do all full backups and save yourself the time and potential headache. If you have large amounts of data, or don't have (or want to take) the time to do a full backup every time, then incrementals can make things go a bit faster, especially if not a lot is changing ... unless you need to recover.
Basically, it comes down to what you are doing, what you need to back up, and how much time you can or want to take when doing the backups, which determines the "best" type of backup to do.