Here is how I back up my data, how do you do it?

I use Dropbox to sync' my files (data) on several computers + use the MS Windows (7, 64-bit) backup program once per week (automatic).
In addition, every few months I use Acronis True Image (2010) to make a complete image of the drive that contains the OS and all programs/software.
Whole computer (whole drive) images are great, and they allow to instantly restore everything on a computer/drive as it was at the time of the image. I used the restore feature several times over the years.

The issue I have with making images is that making one image of a 2TB drive (with OS and all programs) takes about 20 hours (!). It's a major pain.

I always make complete images (as I don't think we can make "partial"/incremental images).
If someone knows that we can make incremental images with Acronis True Image (building incrementally from an initial image) PLEASE let me know - and how we can do this. It would save me a lot of time.

Having suffered a hard drive crash that resulted in a loss of much important data about 20 years ago, I've become a little anal about backups. Since I use Macs with Windows installed on a VM, it's very easy to create bootable clones. I have my backups scheduled with SuperDuper to run at various times during the day. I have two daily backups running 12 hours apart, two weekly backups, one running at midnight on Saturday and the other running at noon on Wednesday. I also have a monthly backup that runs on the first Sunday of every month. I also keep a daily and a monthly backup of my media/data drive.

All of these backups are incremental backups but I regularly erase the drives and allow the backup program to do a full back up. This is after going over my main drives with a couple of good maintenance utilities.

Any seriously important data is also backed up to the cloud.

Since adopting this backup regimen I've had hard drive failures and never broke a sweat. Even Windows is nicely protected and if something goes wrong I just copy the hard drive file from a backup and I'm back in business in just a few minutes.

The only downside is that I'm backing up an SSD to spinning disks and booting from a backup seems to take forever.

I have been backing up since the days of the tape drive backup. My current routine is based around EASEUS todo home to an external hard drive. I start with an automatic full + incremental backup to a second internal drive. Then, I copy that to an external drive that is normally disconnected. But before connecting the external drive, the computer is checked for malware with Webroot's Secure Anywhere, FoolishIT's CryptoPrevent, Malwarebyte's Anti-Exploit and occasional scans with Malwarebyte's Anti Malware and Sophos Virus Removal. The final step is a check for ransomware with Bleeping Computer's ListCrilock.exe. In case of a disaster, the computer can be booted with a recovery disk and fully restored from the external hard drive with data points as far back as the initial installation.

I also run more frequent backups for key files throughout the day and now am password protecting the backed up files.

Then, once a quarter, I copy the C drive and data drive to a portable external hard drive which gets stored in my safe deposit box.

Dear Aaron and CNET Users,
I wrote a small program call DRIVECHK to show space available on all partitions on all of my drives. I show the result of running it below. I use Acronis True Image Home 2015 to backup my Windows based systems. I have a 1TB drive as my main drive with 200GB dedicated to C: and the rest divided into 8 partitions, 7 for even day numbers of the week backups and 1 for quick backups of accounting and sudoku puzzle data. My second drive is a 500GB divided into 7 partitions of the same size and 1 small partition for quick backup of accounting and sudoku puzzles.
Here is a screen shot of DRIVECHK. Sorry, I can't paste it here. Send me an email and I can paste it in there.
Essentially, I do daily backups. Just yesterday I had to restore from a 2 day old backup after getting help from Amazon for a Kindle problem, and finding that I couldn't use the LABEL utility to change the label of a partition I backed up after the Amazon guy helped me out. I figured he had poked around where he shouldn't have, so I restored to get rid of whatever he had done. I had to redo the changes he had me do after the restore finished, and redownload the books that wouldn't download before, but whatever nonsense he had done was wiped out, and my system is back to good now. I use removable drive bays for my SATA drives. I have several alternate 500GB drives I rotate out about every two months. A label I'll use to replace the one on I: later today will be
20150116-I: FriEvn SATA1. Once in a while I forget to do a backup on a day but that is rare. It is very comforting to know you can get back to yesterday's square 1 if you need to. Best wishes... Bill H.

But I'd like to relate only one. I have an extra internal hard drive.

I setup Windows Backup to do standard file backups with incremental after the 1st full backup.

I also have an image backup with Macrium Reflect - I've had more success with it than any other method or software. I store it on a separate external hard drive that is unplugged and stored in a safe location.

I and my clients have tried Norton, EaseUS Todo Backup, various odd XP solutions, Acronis; and all of them have failed when it mattered the most. I suspect it was more that malware attacked the original software and storage location than anything else.

I do this image so I can recover with it, and then use Windows backup to recover the incremental files backed up since the image date. I keep the image on an external drive, so any cryptolocker attacks can't destroy it, but then my day to day backups are not as critical for me. For others, it could be a real pain to put the drive in to do the incremental backup and then remove it for ultimate protection.

For those that have that critical of a data situation, read on bleepingcomputer how cryptolocker can attack your connected backups, so you don't have to weather a disaster of such proportions. My method is the lazy man's way to get the minimum done - but I've had very successful recoveries, and they are so easy it is just a piece of cake. The whole operation may take about 30 minutes. 20 minutes for total image recovery, and another 10 minutes for the Windows backup recovery. I typically have about a terrabyte of data on backup. Easy peasy my friends!


One of the most successful recoveries I did for a client, who didn't use this system, was one where Hewlett Packard had a Norton product already on a partition for a function key recovery upon boot up. You could hit an F key and go through the menu to do a backup AFTER the disaster!! I was gob smacked it worked so well!! The malware, which was a zero day Trojan back door, destroyed his entire installation after that. Fortunately I had all his files in a folder on an external drive, and was able to scan it with Avast to remove the original attack batch file. After doing a factory restore, all I had to do was copy this folder to his documents folder and everything was back as it was before.

Unfortunately, he would not do required maintenance to keep up with the protections I placed on his system and the next time, it totally blew up his hard drive - then he lost the external drive with the original backup. We as IT people cannot be responsible for folks losing their stuff and not doing the basic maintenance needed to prevent attack - so please don't blame your local IT guy for your mistakes.

My hard drive crashed after I had transferred all my old family photos to the hard drive. I was told it would cost $2000 to access the data because the zero partition was trashed. I still have the hard drive set aside. I installed a new hard drive (1 tb) and immediately set up an external hard drive (2 tb) as a backup drive and opened up an account with Carbonite online. I now keep all my family history stuff on a 2nd external hard drive. Carbonite automatically backs up my internal hard drive and one external hard drive (the family history stuff) several times a day. I back up to my external hard drive once a week, then disconnect it.

I have had to use Carbonite to retrieve my data to the family history stuff once. It was easy. The folders online look exactly like the folders on my hard drives.

I used to use an external hard drive but remembering to do it on a regular basis was my problem! I do a lot of church work (weekly newsletter etc.) and fundraising which involve not just documents but flyers, posters etc. and other 'keep till next year and re-invent' artwork. Realistically, I need to back up daily but I rarely remembered to do it even monthly.

My daughter introduced me to Backblaze - now I never have to think about it, I just leave it to the experts! It's $5 per month (+ or - a few cents - I'm in Australia) and let's face it, $50 (if paid annually) is the cheapest insurance policy you'll ever find! I also use it sometimes to access files on my computer when I'm not at home. I just do a restore of a file or folder and it's available to download in minutes! So it's not just about restoring the entire hard drive, you can restore just one file you want to view or that you've overwritten but want the old version back - you can 'roll back time' for any period up to 30 days ago.

Oh.......it also has a 'find my computer' facility (I've never had to use this but it's good to know).

I'm sold on this effortless and cheap way to back up (instantly!)

Blu Ray M-Disk archival disks
2 USB HDD's
Email accounts
USB sticks
iCloud

Later in the year I am going to get a WD my cloud x4 w/ Red 4T drives and run it as a RAID 10

I back up about every 4-6 months

In my laptop I have two partitions: C for operating system, and the other E for my data.
Whenever I have to backup the Data, I simply use a USB hard drive.
I always use a backup software FREEFILESYNC.
Through this software I synchronize whole data partition E on the USB harddrive.
It works very simply and easily.
Through this process Each and every file or folder, which has been changed or worked on, is easily updated.
Give it a try.

I concur with Aaon's backup approach. However, I would add the following additional requirements which I have incorporated into my own backup strategy:

1. Historical trace:
From my perspective, it is essential to have the means to trace historically the contents of my files. Having a single copy of a file contents if not sufficient. If that file gets corrupted, and you only got one copy of the corrupted contents, you are out of luck. What you need is to be able to go back in time and look at the contents of that file as it was BEFORE corruption occurs.

To do this, I create a new copy of the backup material on a daily basis. To keep the the volume of the backup material manageable, at the end of each month, I archive permanently 3 of these copies, from the 1st, 11th and 21th of the month and store those on a different media and discard the rest.

2. Backup on duplicate media.
You can't rely on a single media for all your backup material. You must assume that any media will fail. Besides using RAID NASD, I maintain all my backup archives in duplicate identical copies, on separate media.

3. Don't trust the Cloud
For security and privacy reasons, I do not entrust ANY of my data to the Cloud. All backup material is stored on my own local media.

Currently I use Carbonite on my laptop but, of course, that only covers by data. And it doesn't cover my wife's machine. I have backed up my image occasionally using my Apricon hardware and a spare drive, but that is occasionally only.

Thanks for the quite clearly written method and the introduction to Acronis.

I have been doing regular backups for 30 years, starting on VAX computers. I learned my lesson back then when a disk crashed and we not only lost all the data, but also lost customers due to that data loss.

I've tried a number of backup methods and programs. But I've reverted to the very basics. I simply do a copy of my Documents, Photos, Videos, and Music when I feel I've made enough changes to my internal hard drive content. Those duplicates are easy to view because they look exactly like my main hard drive.

I've had too many issues with fancy backup programs that create their own method of storing files that I can't view without using that program, and often those programs do not have good user interfaces. I've also had troubling issues when I did want to restore a file and the fancy backup software couldn't do it. Nuts to that. I know there are some good backup programs out there. I have simply moved on and do a straight Windows copy.

I don't do any kind of incremental backups, only full backups.

Large capacity hard drives are dirt cheap these days. I can find 2TB drives for less than $100 and prices are dropping all the time.

I do my backups to external hard drives which I plug into USB for the backup, then unplug when done. I keep the hard drives in a small 2 hour fire safe. It would be wise to store a copy off site but, being retired, I no longer have an office in which to keep one and don't have anyone nearby where I would keep a copy. I do not want to pay for "cloud" storage. Currently the size of the data that I backup is 1.4TB. I have 7TB in total of which one 2TB drive is my internal drive. Two other 2TB drives are my backup drives.

My backups take a long time, but who cares? I start them and sometime in the next 24 hours they are done.It all happens in the background and my desktop is powerful enough that the copy process doesn't bother me in terms of CPU or disk access. My C drive is all system and no data. I use a D drive for data.

I also do full image backups of my C drive about every six months in case I have a crash. It's way too much trouble to rebuild a new C drive by loading all of the software and setting everything up. It's a snap to build a new HDD C drive from an image backup.

So my only weakness, I feel, is not storing backups off site.

My method is: An SSD for the OS and programmes and a hard drive for ALL data (all data folders are referenced/linked to ensure data goes to the hard drive by default). A ESATA backup hard drive is permanently connected but switched off. Whenever there is a major update on the SSD Acronis software is used to create a full image, first switching ON the backup drive. I prefer a full backup each time and have two images on the backup, each is updated alternately. Data backup is done more frequently once a week, not much data is created.
If the OS is corrupted beyond System Restore ability the OS can be replaced by one of the images without disturbing the data on the hard drive. Backup drive security is simply switching it off until required.

First of all, my windows system, and most installed programs are on a 120G SSD. Content I create, or media, is on a CHD. Not an option for laptop users, but this is a large Desktop case, with several drives.

It's easy to relocate Music, Video, as so on within Windows to do this. I use Acronis True Image for the Windows 8 system drive, and my media and documents are backed up using Windows File History to an external CHD. This not only backs up, but offers versioning for changes in files. Finally, most media is also backed up to Dropbox.

I have a laptop at work. I like to backup the laptop daily and then take the backup off site. I was worried that someone could steal my backup drive if I left it in my car to go to a restaurant after work.

So, I use the Apricorn-Padlock USB 3.0, 1TB external hard drive. It is about the size of an andriod cell phone, but thicker. It has a keypad built on top of the drive enclosure (looks like a telephone keypad). All data on the drive is encrypted by the hardware built into the drive. (no software to install on my laptop). If someone steals the backup drive, the data is already encrypted and cannot be unencrypted with out the 8 digit code. If they try too many times to access the drive the data is automatically destroyed.

My backup software is MS Windows backup. I can access my backup data from any computer with MS Windows. My laptop has 380gb of software and data. I backup the system and all files. I let MS backup control how to backup. Which allows it to do incremental and backup changes and saves time. I am able to work using the laptop while the backup runs in the back ground.

I also use Acronis to do a monthly "clone" of my laptop hard drive and I store that drive offsite.

Just having a backup was not enough for me. I must be able to get back up and running in a short period of time. I bought a used laptop of the exact same model. If the sprinkler system went off at work and fried my laptop, I could be up and running in 1 hour. I take my extra laptop, insert the cloned drive, restore updated files from the backup and I'm ready!

Mike G, CPA

The first things to consider when you think about backup are you reasons: hardware or software failure, external natural phenomena (e.g., flood, fire), and cyberattack such as the ransomware discussed at great length last week.
In order to protect your data against all of these things, at least part of you backup scheme should include off-premise storage such as provided by cloud-based services. This storage should also hold several versions of each file. Why? If your files are held for ransom and only a single copy is stored offline, it may be replaced by the new, unreadable version before you become aware of the problem.

For those of you who fear the cloud: get over it by encrypting your data before sending it to the cloud. Then practice retrieving it and decrypting it. Cloud storage solutions are cheap and sometimes free, and they really do work. If you encrypt your data, no one can use it even if they steal it.

I've worked in the Telecommunications Industry and I've seen the catastrophes that occur when one does not back-up important data. Therefore, I'm very paranoid about protecting my data.I use the following scheme(s) to preserve my data:

1) When I purchase a new PC I immediate clone the hard drive and store it;
2) I backup the HD to DVD -/+R discs, and;
3) After updating the PC software and cleaning out what I don't need, I backup to DVD R/W discs.

This preserves a "base backup" to rebuild the PC to any state I desire in case of a catastrophic failure, or when I reformat and rebuild it every couple of years. I can also use any of these backups to rebuild the PC and put it in its "original" state if I decide to sale or donate it.

Next I:
4) Restore/Install my data files;
5) Backup the PC to my Western Digital My Cloud EX2 6TB NAS and WD Essentials portable drives, and;
6) Backup music and picture files to older individual HD's.

The WD Essentials HD is removed from the system and stored offsite. I update it 2-to-3 times a year. The NAS drive is used for daily backup and household distribution of music and picture files to other devices in my home (audio receiver and Blu-ray players can read from the NAS drive). I use a Thumb Drive if I need to share pictures or music outside the home network. I also make DVD music discs for long-term storage of .wav and .flac files which allows me to reduce physical album, cassette and CD media.

I've recently purchased an external Blu-ray drive to replace the DVD drive for "hard" backups.

Carbonite. Or, a similar service.

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - Leonardo DiVinci

I go in for overkill:
Background: I use Win7 OS with AVG antivirus (free version) and Super Antispyware (free version). Yeah, I'm a cost conscious guy.
a. Critical data (I work from home, so some office data + some personal stuff) - I set for a daily back up to the cloud - I currently use IDrive. It does the backup automatically and I don't have to bother. I have had occasion to retrieve a file or two I've hard deleted by error and it works great. Of course, confidentiality is a problem, so they've got to be encrypted - a little additional work. I restrict it to critical data so that it stays in the free limit.
b. Periodic (fortnightly approximately), I use Transcend USB drives (8 GB) to back up using their program. It basically creates a zip file of the selected directories. This also is only for important data. One level down from critical, levels of importance being my personal rating of each. So, important includes critical.
c. Periodic (monthly approximately) - External hard drive 1 TB - all data, including our family and travel photos, music and other stuff.

The pen drives and EHD are stored in a fire-proof I have when they're not in use. That way, a physical accident at the computer desk still leaves me with recovable data.

As I said, importance is relative, depending on how easily the lost data can be re-created or how confidential it is. Occasionally, I include data I might require in a hurry / quick reference though they're not important. For instance, legal references which I can get using a library (online or offline).

I have used several Acronis backup software before ver. 15 excellent and then Used ver. 15 . While trying to Restore a crashed C: Drive . It wrote to two of my external usb drives (Pictures & Downloaded Software ) the C: Drive backup for Win 8.1 and erased the Pictures & Downloads.

I have a small professional practice with one server raid 5 with three disks and 4 Ethernet workstations. I have three partitions on my server, one for software and operating system and 2 for data. I never backup my software figuring that if a catastrophic event happens, new hardware will require reinstallation anyway and since all of my software is available from vendor websites, I feel I can be up and running in a day. I'm at my office about 320 days per year and I back up 320 times per year. There are many backup programs out there and I have found that Genie9 works as well as I need it to.

My cycle is to perform a full backup once every 2 weeks or so and an incremental backup every night before I go home. Each backup is encrypted and stored on my server for about a year. I power down all my computers at the end of each day. The backup folder is synced with a cloud service. This way, I can restore a data file to its condition as of any day in the past year. Since my data files do not change all that often (my software writes lots of little data files), my daily backup rarely takes longer than 5 minutes.

In addition to my server and cloud, I copy the backup file each day to a 64gb flash drive which I swap out at home at the end of each cycle.

If I get a Crypto virus, I will know about it and will lose data only since the previous day. If the virus should upload to my cloud server, then I would lose data only for the last 2 weeks. Certainly not a lot of fun, but, in my case, not the end of the world.