A lesson in having reliable backups

hsehestedt · May 15, 2025

CountMike said:
It's not about OS, it's everything else I worry about

Amen! This is exactly why I have a different backup plan for my data than I do for the OS drive. Losing the OS drive is pretty much a non-event for me. I have syspreped Windows images that will reinstall Windows along with my most used apps all pre-installed already. I can install that completely unattended so I can have the OS drive recovered in about 15 minutes.

As noted previously, the only part of this that is a pain is apps that don't allow you to manage their license. I then need to go to the app maker and beg to reset my license. In this instance I simply restored a backup from a few days earlier (May 5th) and then deactivated those programs before reinstalling from scratch. Why did I reinstall from scratch when I had a good backup that was just a few days old? I like to do a clean install every now and then anyway, so I saw this as an opportunity to do so to reorganize a few things that I wanted to alter anyway.

But this also caused me to rethink my backup strategy.

My previous backups were like this:

Full backups on the 1st of every month.
Differentia backup every Sunday.
Incremental backups every day except Sundays and the 1st of the month.

All backups are retained for 6 months.

The problem with this is that it is one month between full backups so if either a full or differential backup gets corrupted, I could potentially lose as much as a month of backups. So, I have now revised my backups like this:

Full backups every Sunday.
Differential backup every day except Sundays.

With this scheme, the most time I can lose with any one corrupted backup is one week.

In this event I had one bad incremental backup. What's interesting is that my backups get placed on 3 separate drives at the time that they are created and every backup includes a verification. So, whatever corrupted my incremental backup took out all 3 copies.

Note that it is not Macrium Reflect that places the backup on multiple drives. I use StableBit Drive Pool which can automatically write any data written to a specific folder to as many different drives as I want so long as they are in the same drive pool.

I guess I'm going to have to suggest to Macrium to add a feature that allows a backup to be saved to multiple distinct locations. The good old Veritas System Recovery (previously Norton Ghost) has that capability so I'm considering switching to it at least on a temporary basis.

hsehestedt · May 15, 2025

Stigg said:
My 3 image backup applications in order of preference are:

TeraByte Image For Windows (A component of TeraByte Drive Image Backup And Restore Suite)

Drive Snapshot

Macrium Reflect

@Stigg, I have a question about Drive Snapshot. I'm going under the assumption that you have Drive Snapshot licensed. If not, you may not know the answer to this:

Do you know if purchase of a single license to this allows for installation on multiple machines or is it only good for a single machine?

Stigg · May 15, 2025

hsehestedt said:
@Stigg, I have a question about Drive Snapshot. I'm going under the assumption that you have Drive Snapshot licensed. If not, you may not know the answer to this:

Do you know if purchase of a single license to this allows for installation on multiple machines or is it only good for a single machine?

I just checked my receipt, and it says "1 Workstation".

Drive Snapshot is somewhat unique in the fact that the license is stored in the snapshot.exe / snapshot64.exe executable, once added. I guess that means it relies on honesty.

hsehestedt · May 15, 2025

Stigg said:
I just checked my receipt, and it says "1 Workstation".

Drive Snapshot is somewhat unique in the fact that the license is stored in the snapshot.exe / snapshot64.exe executable, once added. I guess that means it relies on honesty.

Thanks!

EDIT: My main interest in this program is the easy scripting for this. I have a small 10.5" Chuwi laptop that has a screen which displays in portrait mode outside of Windows, for example, when booting Windows installation media, Windows PE, etc. It makes navigation to recover a disk image very difficult. In fact, Macrium Reflect won't display properly making recovery impossible. I want to script recovery in a Win PE image so I don't have to interact with it.

Stigg · May 15, 2025

hsehestedt said:
Thanks!

EDIT: My main interest in this program is the easy scripting for this. I have a small 10.5" Chuwi laptop that has a screen which displays in portrait mode outside of Windows, for example, when booting Windows installation media, Windows PE, etc. It makes navigation to recover a disk image very difficult. In fact, Macrium Reflect won't display properly making recovery impossible. I want to script recovery in a Win PE image so I don't have to interact with it.

You're right. Drive Snapshot is unique and extremely reliable. I don't even use the GUI for running my schedules. I use scripts.

The snapshot64.exe version I am using is 455 KB. It's hard to believe that a program so small can be so powerful. I am surprised that no one has ever made a thread about it.

Code:

Snapshot Switches Shortcuts (Change the path to wherever snapshot64.exe is located. It can be run from anywhere.)

%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Snapshot\snapshot64.exe /?

%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Snapshot\snapshot64.exe --?

CountMike · May 15, 2025

I keep my data away from OS disk, almost never use default places which must be worst place to be in case of OS corruption. Because of that I now have 6TB in 4 NVM SSDs installed Each of those other 3 is dedicated for different types of files.
OS drive is backed up full once a month and incremental daily with 3 last ones kept. all by Macrium Reflect on one of those disks but .mrimg from full backup copied to offline HDD. Don't copy them all to HDD because I can't lose more than 3 day's change.
For disks with pure data on them I used just to copy them manually to offline HDDs with copy/replace command but switched to Hasleo which is free and I have only one MR license.
Hasleo I set up to backup only some folders which are frequently used, data that sits for longtime (month or more) don't need more of backup. I set icon for Hasleo already setup like that on desktop and it starts work as soon as it's activated.

Levitate11 · May 15, 2025

hsehestedt said:
Full backups every Sunday.
Differential backup every day except Sundays.

This is the standard business approach... unless RAID is involved. But then you still need backups. The other half is to store your backups in a safe location that isn't the primary physical location of your business (or for most of us, residence). There's other stuff like and alternate computing location on tap if needed, manual/hard copy backup of data (mostly obsolete these days), and a documented manual of procedures to make it all happen.

Like others here, I don't really worry about software. Not do I have an alternate location in a different region ready to roll and Iron Mountain doesn't store my data. It would be a royal PITA to try have to rebuild my system from scratch but I could handle it. But data is generally irretrievable. I want my data backed up regularly, if nothing else.

There are two kinds of people: Those who do backups, and those who will.

hsehestedt · May 15, 2025

I've had my share of close calls.

Back in the IDE days I had a SCSI cable go wonky on me and it caused random crap to be written to the HDs including my backup drive. Fortunately, I always have multiple copies of my important data.

A year or two ago I had a network cable cause silent corruption. I tried to install a program and it told me that the executable was not valid. I eventually got to a point of doing a bit-by-bit comparison on about 11 TB of data (yes, it took a LONG time). Found like 3 bad files. After extensive testing I would find one or two new bad files every couple of weeks. After weeks of testing I finally isolated it to a network cable. I now do bit-for-bit comparisons once a month, although thankfully the data set that I need to test is now only about 200 GB, but I have never had a single additional corruption since (until now).

RD Mercer · May 15, 2025

One thing I have learned from this thread is, no backup is fail safe, if you depend on anything man made for your backup, they are subject to fail. So yes, backing up to multiple drives is probably the best idea, with the limited technology we have for today to do backups. At this point, I don't see anything that's fail safe in the near future, especially if we're depending on drives or the cloud to store our information.

gunrunnerjohn · May 15, 2025

Levitate11 said:
Short story on surge protection: Local protectors may work on some equipment and may help to destroy others.

Surge suppressors trigger and send the spike down the ground wire. Unfortunately, residential electrical systems bond the ground to the neutral at the service panel. So the surge will hit the bus bar at the panel and travel back up the neutral to your equipment.

The only real solution is a whole house protector. That will have some very fast blow devices and a grounding system sufficient to handle the 20-30K amps that a strike produces.

The NEC (USA) now requires a whole house protector for new installations or renovations that involve the service panel.

I can't find the picture right now of my friend that called me over to his house after a lightning storm to help him recover, it was a sight to see! The Whole House Surge Protector had the cover partly blown off, and char marks were evident all around the lid seam. the surge took out about half the electronics in the house, almost all the electronic dimmers, and a bunch of LED bulbs. After I saw it carnage, I told him to call his insurance company, he ended up spending more than $4,000 to replace/repair all the stuff that was zapped.

Another electrical fault I've seen that is deadly to electronics is a floating neutral, that happened to me and two other people I know at various times. When the neutral line is not connected, the two phases of the 115V don't have any ground reference. If a big load happens on one phase from the panel, it'll drag that voltage way down and the other phase will soar!

In my case, I have a little dual meter box on my power that shows me the voltages of each phase, one was at 160V and the other was at 78V. I flipped off the main breaker and started looking! It turned out that the original install had been poorly done and my neutral like had a loose connection in the main breaker box. Tightened that up and all was well. However, I did have to replace a TV, a couple clock radios, and one of the cable boxes that didn't appreciate the high voltage!

gunrunnerjohn · May 15, 2025

hsehestedt said:
But this also caused me to rethink my backup strategy.

My previous backups were like this:

Full backups on the 1st of every month.
Differentia backup every Sunday.
Incremental backups every day except Sundays and the 1st of the month.

I don't do any incremental backups, all my intermediate backups are differential backups. My cycle is every 14th day I do a full backup, and I retain nine generations of the backups. I only retain two generations of the archive backups, that's a couple TB of data that doesn't change that often. Then there's the off-line disks with similar backups and the NAS backups...

There are two types of computer users, those that have lost data and those that are going to.

TraderGary · May 15, 2025

It's amazing to me that only about 30% of home computer users actually do backups.

gunrunnerjohn · May 15, 2025

TraderGary said:
It's amazing to me that only about 30% of home computer users actually do backups.

It's also a point of dismay when they need them!

RD Mercer · May 15, 2025

TraderGary said:
It's amazing to me that only about 30% of home computer users actually do backups.

That’s probably because the other 70% probably don’t even use a computer, most of the younger generation are content just using their cell phones. In reality, unless you’re using your computer in a business, you’re not likely to need a backup. With the sizes of today’s flash drives, you can store all your Docs, pictures, etc on a flash drive. My guess is not many have hundreds of apps on their computers anymore, like the old days, they use their cell phones apps. with everything stored in the cloud.

TraderGary · May 15, 2025

It's amazing to me that only about 30% of home computer users actually do backups.

gunrunnerjohn · May 15, 2025

TraderGary said:
It's amazing to me that only about 30% of home computer users actually do backups.

Reading comprehension isn't what is used to be . :lmao:

The real kicker is people that do everything on their phones don't think they need to consider backup. That's right until they lose everything when the phone craps out!

Edwin · May 15, 2025

TraderGary said:
It's amazing to me that only about 30% of home computer users actually do backups.

I don't do backups.
I have..., in the past, but not lately or on a regular basis.
I don't know why, either!

..., Meh...

gunrunnerjohn · May 15, 2025

Edwin said:
I don't do backups.

See my signature...

RD Mercer · May 15, 2025

gunrunnerjohn said:
The real kicker is people that do everything on their phones don't think they need to consider backup. That's right until they lose everything when the phone craps out!

Naw, they just go and buy the latest and greatest cell phone, and recover everything back just like it was from the cloud.

Edwin · May 15, 2025

gunrunnerjohn said:
See my signature...

I don't show sigs!

A lesson in having reliable backups

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