Incremental Backup Best Practices - what is the secret configuration :-)

Hello All;

I love TrueImage Home 2009 so much better than the days of Ghost. However I've worked out this scheme that basically backups my computer daily using incremental partitaion backup to a external usb 2.0 drive which works great. Plus I keep all my working files on that drive as well so I don't want anything to happen to the data on the 1 TB drive. So I run the partiton backup at night then I do the incremental file backup which backs-up everything from the main storage usb plus some selected dynamic data area on my labtop to another 1 TB usb drive. Of course the first run of the back up takes two days becuase I have 640 GB of data but the incremental backups shouls be small. Anyway the incremental backup end up being larger than the source drive itself and runs out of space. I tried redoing it and suffer through the first long backup but it just did it again.

Looking for some collective wisdom how to come up with a best as you can multiple external usb HD and data backup scheme that is working for someone. It's silly how much time I've interested in trying to get the prefect recipe.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

All the best,
Greg

Long live "Big Bang Theory!!!"

 

True image is great for backing up operating systems and programs, however when it comes to hundreds of GB of data I think there are better solutions around.

If I were you I would continue to use TI for the OS partition and would use something like Second Copy, Karens Replicator or some other sync program to give a backup of data on a seperate USB drive.

TI is just not suited to handling large volumes of data particularly when a large proportion of it is natively compressed: Such as video and music files.
I note that you are using a base image and increments. You should take care because when it comes to the "consolidation" process this requires a heck of a lot of extra space and time to complete sucessfully.
Everyday operations like defrags or even an image after a restore can be the same size as a base image.

With a duplication program you will not have these problems and because data is kept in its native format the odd glitch will not flush the whole backup down the toilet.

Xpilot

 

Hello gvmoney,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image

I would recommend you to perform a partition/hard disk backup of your first USB hard drive. Backup of the whole hard disk drives or partitions should run successfully regardless of the amount of files on the disks.

Thank you.

--
Oleg Lee