Back-up Advice Please.

[Technoid101]

I have a lack of experience in this area (best backup practices in Win 7) so if anyone can advise me please do.

I have three backup solutions installed on my laptop. Microsoft OS. My Norton security suite and the laptops hardware vendor solution. I know the importace for regular back-up protocols but is it nessasary to use all three? It feels a bit redundant. Are there any contention issues?

Thanks.

 

[linney]

Try the Microsoft option first if you don't like it try one of the other options. I like to make a complete Image of my Partitions every 10 days or so for easy restoration of a whole Partition should something go wrong. I also just copy and save off-machine any valuable data I can't afford to be without as a backup to the Image backup.

 

[rclarke250]

The windows 7 backup is pretty good, I have it do a complete backup of all my machines, to my NAS every Sunday night.

 

[goombawaho]

I use Robocopy in mirror mode to copy the most important data on my machine to another computer. But you could also do it to an external hard drive. The beauty of mirror mode is that it is very fast - it only copies files that have been changed or new files. Note that it DOES purge files that have been deleted.

It's included in windows 7 by default. Here's a batch file example which you can run as a scheduled task or on demand. Nothing wrong with Windows 7 backup, but this is simple for backing up a data folder and not your whole PC like an image. I'd also recommend some online backup in case your computer room burns down (Mozy, Carbonite, etc.) to really cover your bacon.

robocopy.exe C:\Data\ \\PC2\backup\ /MIR /ZB /R:2 /W:5 /LOG:"C:\BackupData.log"