PC Backup

[fredtgreco]

What are you using nowadays to backup PC images and data? I had used Acronis True Image a couple of years ago, but migrated to Norton Ghost 10 because of the better restore capabilities (for my machine at least). I was recently using Ghost 12, which has a very good UI, but it does not work for me in Vista (at least with my Vaio). I had a failure trying a restore - the machine would not boot.

So I can use the Vista internal, backup procedures (running Vista Ultimate), but I am looking for redundancy. I'll use Mozy for some files (I'd prefer to keep it under 2GB to avoid the monthly cost), and want another backup program. Has anyone used Acronis True Image 11 in Vista?

Any other recommendations?

 

[Semper Fidelis]

Well, I was going to recommend Mozy but then you mentioned online cost. I've had a digital camera for 8 years and, for me, the peace of mind of preserving 10's of thousands of images in an offsite facility cannot be beat.

Honestly, for me, when it comes to backing up my computer I only worry about my documents, financial records, videos, and images.

I have a two tier backup system.

1. I use an external hard drive and I literally use a simple file synchronization utility to sync the data that I care about in two folders. It compares the two directories and finds any out of sync information and then syncs between the two. I use another USB drive to sync Docs between my notebook and home computer. My philosophy is that, if I crash, I don't really care about restoring the entire hard drive but just the stuff I can't re-install. The shareware program I use is many years old but still works great and it's called fsync. I'm sure there are better options out there. The reason I never liked Ghost (even though I had it) is that I don't want a program that eats up memory for something that I can just achieve by occasional file syncs.

2. I use Mozy for the same data above.

 

[tcalbrecht]

Being an old hacker from way back, I use a batch file with a bunch of xcopy commands corresponding to each subdirectory I wish to back up. I use an external hard drive as the media. I usually run it manually after my weekly virus scan completes.

Crude but effective. I may migrate to Robocopy one of these days.