Poll on Backup software

hdmi said:

An affordable, easy way to avoid this particular problem with external drives is to just use multiple ones so that you can then swap the drives around by moving only one drive at a time i.e. without ever taking all of the copies away from the safe spot at once.

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You can run multiple time machine backup drives. When you run the backup, it's incremental and compares what's on the internal hard drive to what is on the time machine backup.

I don't leave my time machine drive connected and backing up continuously on my mac. I occasionally connect it and let it run a backup. My Mac is mostly for playing, and experimenting. There really isn't anything important on it. It's connected to my network and my Onedrive account....so anything important since in those location.

RD Mercer said:

As a rebel, I hardly ever follow the crowd, I have found in my 71 years, they can lead you down a rabbit hole. Maybe I'm just to old school, but Acronis has been working for me since XP Pro was introduced.

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Not as old as you, hope to get there, but less than 7 from you

Anyway, I agree and also have been using Acronis for years. Currently running the latest version of Acronis Cyber Protect.

pparks1 said:

You can run multiple time machine backup drives. When you run the backup, it's incremental and compares what's on the internal hard drive to what is on the time machine backup.

I don't leave my time machine drive connected and backing up continuously on my mac. I occasionally connect it and let it run a backup. My Mac is mostly for playing, and experimenting. There really isn't anything important on it. It's connected to my network and my Onedrive account....so anything important since in those location.

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My only point was that if you occasionally connect it and let it run a "backup", then what you have got is not an actual backup per se, and, the pure observation that the data isn't important to you does not change this fact. The act of persistently confounding vulnerable copies with reliable backups is just not helping anyone. Sorry, but that's just how data security factually works. Human error number one... thinking that it is a reliable backup when the reality is that it's not. Sure, you can argue that other criteria besides the reliability factor also play an important role when deciding how to protect one's data. My point was not that you can't do that. You most certainly always can, BUT... the definition of the word backup is going to be unaffected by such discussions. (Even, if the discussions are still nevertheless meaningful.)

I completely agree with you--if you are working as one person of an IT team whose only responsibility it is to maintain an old-fashioned, but fairly bulletproof, backup ENTERPRISE. Grandfathering copies off to an offsight location, preferably underground or in another state is a great idea. Implementing such a system is ridiculous for every small time user, no matter how important he/she thinks their material is. I was asking about the capabilities of a particular program that didn't implicitely assume that:
1) a nuclear power blast would destroy the original computer and any grandfathered copies placed in a vault or within miles of the original.
2) a hacker would target a main computer and all the outboard drives connected to it

I was just talking about the probability of a computer with an equivalent or larger outboard drive with software installed that would mirror and sync all computer activity would be a likely target of a random event that would down both computers at the same time.

I brought this up because I was having a hard time believing the capabilities of TimeMachine as I'd been told them, are true. If they truly are true then it's an insult to all programs written for the Windows platform that no one's come up with anything equivalent.

As regards running TimeMachine only sometimes: That, like running a backup program only sometimes (which, incidentally, happens to be the only way a backup, or an imaging, program is run) is problematic. Only if a program like Time Machine is run continuously will its 'methodology' be effective.

So what I seem to gather from the last posts is: Time Machine works if you use it the way it intends.

jro11 said:

I completely agree with you--if you are working as one person of an IT team whose only responsibility it is to maintain an old-fashioned, but fairly bulletproof, backup ENTERPRISE. Grandfathering copies off to an offsight location, preferably underground or in another state is a great idea. Implementing such a system is ridiculous for every small time user, no matter how important he/she thinks their material is.

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The simple fact that countless people all over the world already are using popular cloud storage services for personal use is why you are hopelessly wrong. The concept of creating backups is to make one or more copies of the data that you do not want to lose and store it/them elsewhere. It requires a secondary storage space for data.

Again, if you are an average user with a computer in a typical home environment, then the moment when you plug your external drive into your computer e.g. by using a data cable like USB or Thunderbolt, this external drive inevitably will be part of primary storage space until you physically disconnect (unplug) it again and you also physically unplug it from the power grid. The whole idea here is to not call them separate until they have been separated from each other. Sure, an electrical spike doesn't normally travel across such a data cable in such a way that if one device dies, as an immediate result it also kills the device that's at the other end of the data cable. The cricuit uses built-in protections. But these protections can still fail. Similarly, a consumer grade power strip with a surge protector still isn't adequate to very effectively be able to mitigate the potential risk of killing multiple devices with just a single spark. Most people don't even hook up their "backup" device to a separate AC power line with separate protections.

jro11 said:

I was asking about the capabilities of a particular program that didn't implicitely assume that:
1) a nuclear power blast would destroy the original computer and any grandfathered copies placed in a vault or within miles of the original.
2) a hacker would target a main computer and all the outboard drives connected to it

I was just talking about the probability of a computer with an equivalent or larger outboard drive with software installed that would mirror and sync all computer activity would be a likely target of a random event that would down both computers at the same time.

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Hardware failures, power failures, software errors and user errors are fine examples of how both computers don't even need to be downed at the same time with a nuclear blast to still be able to lose all data permanently. As for your question re mirroring and syncing, no, they both are different concepts. Data backups, although they are related of course, are still a whole other concept.

jro11 said:

I brought this up because I was having a hard time believing the capabilities of TimeMachine as I'd been told them, are true. If they truly are true then it's an insult to all programs written for the Windows platform that no one's come up with anything equivalent.

As regards running TimeMachine only sometimes: That, like running a backup program only sometimes (which, incidentally, happens to be the only way a backup, or an imaging, program is run) is problematic. Only if a program like Time Machine is run continuously will its 'methodology' be effective.

So what I seem to gather from the last posts is: Time Machine works if you use it the way it intends.

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No, the copies that it makes aren't backups until you physically unplug them like I said, and, like I also said, they continue to be backups only until the next time when you plug them back in. The being unplugged is what makes the two different information repositories (primary storage space and secondary storage space) separate from each other. Marketing-speak from Apple is not. It really is that simple.

I use Arq for Mac, but there is a Windows version, too. What I like about it is that I can back up my family’s computers to the 1 TB OneDrive cloud storage that comes with our Microsoft 365 family subscription. It’s the cheapest 6 × 1 TB cloud storage solution I am aware of. 1 TB each is plenty for everyone in the family.

I use Aomei Backupper

I use Cydanix Backup it has a free tier and you can link personal S3 storage for use as backup storage at no cost.

Ghot said:

For my money, backup software should have three things only.
1. Can make full backups.
2. Can restore full backups, even if Windows won't boot.
3. Can make bootable Rescue Media.

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By "for my money" you must mean free - all modern free packages do those 3 things.

Actually, I do not know one (well known as typically discussed on this forum) modern 3rd party package that only does a full backup/restore (excluding crappy Ghost which is a dinosaur app)?

Having said that, you can use the inbuilt Windows FFU (see tutorial in Windows 10 forum) i.e. no 3rd party tool at all, which only does those 3 things - this is not a deprecated feature.

I cannot agree with "should have three things only ".

Modern backup software needs differential or incremental as a minimum.

Nice to have = Rapid Delta Restore, Scheduling, Cloning, Encryption, image security guarding,

I use Aomei because I got a lifetime license for it for around $25. The catch is that the license is locked to the PC.

Hi,
WinPE recovery media only item ever needed.

I say whatever works best for you, and is easy to use for you. I've been using Acronis for around 15 years, I still do the tib. backup, but as cheap as SSD's and Conventional drives are now days, "well unless you have 10 TB to back up" I also clone my primary drive to a hard drive. I know this thread or threads like this will be going on when Jesus comes back. Again, I'm sure all this backup software works, use whatever works for you, you drive a Ford, I drive a GMC, they both will get you from point A to point B if you take care of them, so take care of your PC, keep it physically clean, no electronic likes heat, and if you really don't understand registry tweaks, stay out of the registry, 10-11 they work great right out of the box, well they do for me.

Bree said:

In addition to monthly full images with Macrium Reflect, I also have written a batch file using RoboCopy to make full or incremental backup copies of my user document folders to an HDD that is shared on my network through my router's USB socket. I use it to run a full backup once a month, and incremental backups twice a week.

Oh, and I also have File History turned on. You can never have enough backups

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Why not just use Google Drive desktop app for that? It's a 2-way sync tho

CSharpDev said:

Why not just use Google Drive desktop app for that? It's a 2-way sync tho

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Because I like to keep my backups local, not somewhere in the cloud.

Bree said:

Because I like to keep my backups local, not somewhere in the cloud.

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Certainly true that the cloud is someone else's computer. What about private cloud or self-hosted?

Hi,
Yeah lets not forget upload and download time lol

Besides hdd and ssd's are dirt cheap now days no need to save backups anywhere else but locally.

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
Yeah lets not forget upload and download time lol

Besides hdd and ssd's are dirt cheap now days no need to save backups anywhere else but locally.

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I wouldn't call SSDs dirt cheap lol

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
Yeah lets not forget upload and download time lol

Besides hdd and ssd's are dirt cheap now days no need to save backups anywhere else but locally.

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Besides, theft, fire, and flood only happen to someone else. Never to me.

RD Mercer said:

I know this thread or threads like this will be going on when Jesus comes back.

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Jesus is very smart. He's staying away from it all...

CSharpDev said:

I wouldn't call SSDs dirt cheap lol

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Having to reinstall an OS and reinstalling all your software, and your time to do it all, isn't dirt cheap either, unless you just don't value your time. I like doing a TIB. backup, but with a clone to another drive you can instantly get back to what you were doing, unless you have lots of time on your hands, like me.