Backup Strategey?

I originally tagged this question onto a different post, but want feedback specific to my situation, hopefully you guys can help.

I'm looking for a good backup strategy - here's my situation:

I have:

1. main drive (C) (500GB capacity)
2. external usb drive (500GB capacity)
3. another external usb drive (500GB capacity)

I thought it would be good to have a redundent backup strategy, but then again, I'm not sure the best way to do this. What I think I'm going to do is:

1. An incremental nightly to one drive
2. A complete image nightly to another drive
3. Folders & Files to the 2nd drive nightly too

Maybe this is over-kill? Or a better way?

Thank you again,
Paul

 

You'll probably get several opinions. Including mine!

What ever you decide, if the data is critical, then off site storage of the backups should be part of your strategy. If you don't consider off site storage, then fire, theft, weather, you name it can can ruin things for you in an instant, no matter how many ways you back it up.

As for strategy, at home, I image a time or two a month and backup all data related info whenever any of it has changed. I store the data backups off site and always have at least one image off site too. (I use DVDs and portable HDs for home.)

At work, we do complete data backups nightly and store them off site. If the server were to ever take a dive, then we'll rebuild it. No images for it... (We use tapes at work.)

 

Thanks Pete,
You maybe onto something. The backups are taking forever, doing an incremental, an image and then my documents every night. Just doing a complete image ever night but alternating drives seems like a good way to save time and space. Why does incremental seem so appealing to me? I suppose if I went with an alternating image, I could forego the files/settings/document backup too.

Any thoughts on using the setting though to backup whenever something is installed or changes are made?

What's FDISR?

Thanks again,
Paul

Hi Han,

This is a home environment and off-site storage maybe overkill financially for me. But it's good to hear how you (and others) are backing up. These gives me an idea of what to do. Much thanks.

Paul

 

Maybe not. Offsite could be mom and dad's house, a locked file cabinet at work (depends on the privacy level of course), a close friend's house and so on. The key is getting the data somewhere else and having it in a reasonably safe place while it's there...

 

My different opinion :
I would have bought 2 internal harddisks and 1 external harddisk.
- 1 small harddisk for system partition (Windows and Applications)
- 1 big harddisk for data partition.
I hardly backup my system partition, but I backup my data partition every day, because I worked very hard to get them.

My system partition isn't work, I restore it in 10 minuts using my pointing finger.
I have 2 system partition backups :
1. Clean backups based on an installation from scratch.
2. Daily backups, which I consider as possibly infected.

I also use FirstDefense-ISR, which is still the king of all ISR-softwares in possibilities.

 

Re: Backup Strategy?

I wrote THIS back in 2005 and it was tailored to a PDA platform; however, the processes and key points are applicable to any platform.