Back-Up Frequency?

I had never done an image back-up until I bought a W7 system. W7 makes it easy to make an image back-up. I might add that I have never had my system crash so I never needed a back-up. I backed up the systems when new, but have not done it since. I have backed up data, but not an image.

How often do you make an image back up of your system? I do not want to use anything other than the W7 to do the back-ups.

Thanks,
Jerry

 

It really depends on what I'm doing: usually fortnightly and certainly before a major MS update. Sometimes I backup my system before I'm testing a new application or configuration. Unlike you, I restore images very often. I would rather restore a known good image rather than scan for hours with different scanners (it only takes about 10 minutes to backup and the same time to restore).

 

Hi Osaban,
Thanks for the reply. I don't do the same type of testing you do. I only check an application to see if it runs well on my system. I have never had a virus or a crash that required a restore.
However, I recognize that such might occur, and am pleased that W7 makes imaging so easy.

Thanks again,
Jerry

 

I never used to make backups much, but lately because I'm a freelancer I have a lot of valuable data on my computers. So I've been made to use regular scheduled backups.

With around 2TB worth of free space, on a 7200RPM sataII hard drive, taking image backups of your entire hard drives is now a realistic option.

 

To create image backups of the system partition, the Windows 7 backup program is somewhat slow, and it creates non-compressed, big images. In my Windows 7 x64 installation, images are 17 GB, time to create them is 10 min using USB 2.0 or 4 min using USB 3.0.

Besides, although I am not totally sure of this (I have only tried once), I think it is not possible to keep more than one image in a partition, because when one image is created it overwrites the previous one (possibly to compensate for the large image sizes).

 

On average every couple weeks, basically whenever I've made enough changes since the last image to warrant a new one. I do them in sets of 1 full + 3 incrementals using ShadowProtect recovery environment. No rhyme or reason in particular why I deploy this method, except that it's what I'm comfortable with and just "feels right" for me