Is this worth having

[Dave Davison]

Couple of questions really; is this freebie worth having and -whilst after many years of computing, this might sound naive - where is ones data saved if the hard drive is e.g. 75% full? Dave

[HansV]

The program appears to have a good reputation, so if you don't have a backup utility yet, it would be nice to get it. The "Lite" version on offer doesn't do incremental backups though (copying only changed files), it only lets you backup ALL files in the selected folders.

You'll need a separate storage medium to create the backups on. Fortunately, external hard disks are very cheap nowadays.

[Dave Davison]

Thanks Hans, I have a 1Terrabyte Seagate external drive so might just give it a go, is there a tutorial on the web explaining the process of backing up as it is something I have never attempted? Cheers Dave.

[HansV]

Backup4All includes a Backup Wizard and Restore Wizard that should guide you through its options.

[Dave Davison]

Appreciate that Hans Have a good day Dave.

[stuck]

If you'd rather spend NO money at all then investigate SyncBack Free:
https://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/index.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Dave Davison]

Thanks Struck will look into that....cheers Dave.

[viking33]

Coincidence? Today I D/L a copy of Backup4all from Giveaway for the Day and Installed and tried it out. ( I do have Acronis True Image ) so this was a curiosity thing. It seemed to go OK and I created a backup but when I rebooted it screwed up my desktop and Task Bar royally!
I uninstalled the thing right away and restored a recent back up with all fine and dandy.
Don't think I will use Backup4all, even as a backup backup.

[Dave Davison]

THANKS Bob; seems the old cliche "if it aint broke don't fix it" is appropriate here so I'll give this a miss. Cheers Dave.

[StuartR]

Make sure you have good backups. When you need them you really need them.

[Dave Davison]

Just yesterday I saw a flier in the window of a local stationery shop offering 64 GB Verbatim memory sticks for the ridiculous price of £9-99 each so got two, ideal for a quick convenient back up resource. Cheers Dave.

[HansV]

That's excellent for backing up individual documents, but not for full-disk backups.

[Dave Davison]

Hi Hans, seeing my C drive is 200 GB & D drive is 736GB I take it I would need a 1 TB external drive if I wanted to back up everything on them which I imagine would take forever after editing one or more documents! or does a backup app / prog just update the newly created files or ones that have been edited? Something I have never done!!!!! I see that M/S comes with a Backup feature but have never ventured there so how does it compare with stand alone versions? Thanks Dave.

[stuck]

My system drive is a 250GB solid state drive. My data drive is a 1TB 'ordinary' hard drive. I have an external 2TB 'ordinary' hard drive that holds my back ups.

I don't bother backing up the system drive, my logic being if that goes bad there's something seriously wrong and I'm going to need a new disk so I might as well rebuild the system from scratch and have a nice new clean slate from which to start again. Others here will think that's daft and will back up their system disk.

The data drive holds about 550GB, i.e. it's about half full. Most of the files are my digital photos. I use SyncBack Free to make a back up of the data drive about once a week or whenever I add more photos to my data drive (which can be daily). I can't remember how long it took Syncback Free to make the first back up but subsequently, because it is only looking for differences between the data drive and the external back up drive it only takes a few mins to complete a back up. NB the USB connection to the exteranl drive is USB3 so it can transfer files at a fair speed.

Ken

[HansV]

I see that M/S comes with a Backup feature but have never ventured there so how does it compare with stand alone versions? Thanks Dave.

If I remember correctly, you'd need to have an external drive connected permanently to use Windows Backup.
I prefer to plug in the backup drive only when I want to create a backup, then keep that drive elsewhere, just in case my computer goes up in flames or is stolen...

[PaulB]

My system drive is a 250GB solid state drive. My data drive is a 1TB 'ordinary' hard drive. I have an external 2TB 'ordinary' hard drive that holds my back ups.

I don't bother backing up the system drive, my logic being -snip-
Ken

My system setup is almost identical to yours: 240GB SSD C: disk, 1TB HDD D: disk, 2TB external HDD. I take great care, however, to back up my system drive.

While it seems easy enough to re-install Windows and all my applications (and to customize them), it would be very time consuming. How I would be able to recreate my Windows user profile alone (C:\Users\username) baffles me. At last glance it consisted of 25,748 folders, 872,122 files and was 41.2 GB in size. It consists of system and application data built up over years of use.

That is why I back up both C: and D: weekly and run incremental backups of both daily. In my case, the size of the C: incremental backup far exceeds the size of the D: incremental and usually falls at between 0.5 and 1.5 GB daily.

[StuartR]

I also have separate C: drive for my operating system and apps, and D: drive for my data.
I do a full image backup of C: every week, and every now and again I have had to restore it
I do a continual backup of D: to a cloud service so that I can recover any data files that I need to
I also do a daily backup of D: to another hard drive, to speed up recovery if I ever need to restore the whole thing

[PaulB]

That's an interesting approach to backups, Stuart. Do you also do incrementals of your C: drive? I have never thought of doing continual backups to the cloud. What kind of software/service do you use to accomplish this?

[JoeP]

There is no good reason to do incremental backups of his C: drive. At most he will have to recover a week's worth of operating system and program updates. It is easier to do the recovery and apply any updates than manage incremental updates and recovery.

[StuartR]

For my C: drive I do a full backup every Sunday morning. I keep the previous three backups so I can recover even if I don't notice something straight away.

For the continuous backups to cloud I use Acronis TrueImage. For files that I modify frequently this keeps copies from the previous hour, day, week, month etc.