How Do You BackUp your System?

[herbs]

I use ghost to create my images, and back up to a cheap NAS box. If its really important I also back up to another hard drive so I have 2 copies and a dvd copy.

[Smoker]

Backups are never overkill in my mind...

I have 3 terrabytes of dasd (mirrored) in PATA and SATA.

I use a tool called SyncBack (works over the net just fine).

So I specify what I want backed up in SyncBack and then run that nightly (very early morning). It is set to run a full backup on Sundays and incrementals otherwise.

My scripts move out the current week's backups so that I have 4 weeks worth of backups. Then I copy all that to another server, so that I have 2 copies of my backup.

I don't use GHOST or other drive imaging tools cause in my mind if I lose my boot drive it's time to have a clean install and there are so many tools out there to slipstream. I prefer to have backups in the raw sense. Not compressed zip'd tar'd etc. Hell I have the space to do that Also the likelyhood of losing my boot drive with a 3 drive RAID-1 boot drive (yes my boot drives are 3 and my other drives are 2 drive RAID-1 configs).

[ACTCMS]

IMHO
The first step in creating a practical backup strategy is to assess your situation. Among the things most of us need to consider are:

What content (software, data or settings) do you have? This may include stuff stored

• on hard disks in or attached to your computer(s)
  
• on removable media (floppy, CD/DVD, tape, flash, etc)
  
• in portable devices (phone, PDA, mp3 player, etc)
  
• on CD cases (Product Keys, etc)
  
• elsewhere (Gmail/Hotmail address books, bookmarks, etc)
  
• who knows? (the userid and password you used to set up your broadband connection 18 months ago, asked windows to remember it for you and then forgot it yourself)

How important is your content, how hard would it be to recreate and how long could you do without it? This could include

• operating system - vital, but could be reinstalled
  
• accounts data - probably depends how close you are to tax return deadline
  
• as yet unwatched TV recordings - painful, but you could always point out to her that the way TV is going, there'll be a repeat along soon
  
• mp3s ripped from latest CD - a pain to lose but not the end of the world
  
• jpgs of the kids - irreplaceable
  
• wedding video - priceless
  
• passwords etc :eek:

Now you know what you've got it makes sense to group it into irreplaceable, important and don't really care or whatever else suits you.

• What threats does your content face. This may include
  
• normal insurance type risks (fire, theft, flood, etc)
  
• equipment failure (hard disk crash, scratched CD/DVD, etc)
  
• user error (file/folder deletes, file overwrites, etc)
  
• miscellaneous (children, pets, etc)

So, once you know what you've got, how important it is, and what threatens it, you can look at the next step. How, when and how often to back it up.

[bdgbill]

Wow, some of you are running really professional setups.

Glad to see so many using Acronis. Ghost was not an option for me because several years ago I swore a blood oath to never use another Symantec product as long as I live.

I guess the data that would hurt the most if I lost it would be my digital photos, work files and music in that order (about 80 GB total).

I like using disk imaging because it also backs up my applications (I have no idea where my MS Office install discs are). I do worry somewhat that I am putting all my eggs in the acronis basket. If the image restore function does not work when I need it, I'm screwed.

I think I will back up my most sensitive stuff to seperate folders on the external drive and burn it to dvd a few times a year.

It's the optical backup thats the big PITA. The data has to be reorganized into DVD sized chunks, there is no good way to figure out what is on which DVD and the actual burning of 15-20 DVD's takes forever.

[fender]

Ghost was a great program back in the late 90's when it was still owned by the Auckland, NZ based Binary Research.

It saved me a ton of time. I too wept when Symantec assimilated it.

[pz1]

Ghost was a great program back in the late 90's when it was still owned by the Auckland, NZ based Binary Research.

Indeed was great for priming tons of W95 PC's. For single use I now have a similar disk-imager Snapshot, which works fine for my backups/archives.

[lajams]

"It's the optical backup thats the big PITA. The data has to be reorganized into DVD sized chunks, there is no good way to figure out what is on which DVD and the actual burning of 15-20 DVD's takes forever."

Yea, I feel your pain. Many years ago, I could do my backups on about that many CDs. Then recently I did that on that many DVDs. I considered dual-layer DVDs, and then HD-DVD, but decided against those options. Since I'm trying to run as cheaply and efficiently as possible, I just use a removeable drive to snag the last full backup file from the server and lock it up at work.

[erik]

I strongly recommend anybody using image backup to at least once get a new disk and do a restore of the most essential image(s).
It is the only way to know if you are realy safe.
I tried and failed so I switch to another utility.

[Ted the Penguin]

I strongly recommend anybody using image backup to at least once get a new disk and do a restore of the most essential image(s).
It is the only way to know if you are realy safe.
I tried and failed so I switch to another utility.

I second this suggestion, it is always good to know if your backup is valid

when I was really ambitious and fixing people systems for them, I actually would make a ghost image, put it on their hard drive in a hidden partition, and then create a bootable CD that would start ghost and write the image out to their disk, the cd was set up to only ask for a confirmation, so all they would have to do is put it in, wait, then hit enter

yeah, its a bit like dell does... but the image I left on their system was not full of crap

[Smoker]

I strongly recommend anybody using image backup to at least once get a new disk and do a restore of the most essential image(s).
It is the only way to know if you are realy safe.
I tried and failed so I switch to another utility.

Is a perfect example of why

I prefer to have backups in the raw sense. Not compressed zip'd tar'd etc.