Acronis works well and supports Vista too, has for a long time. It will back up absolutely everything, that means after a hard drive crash you restore the backup to a new drive and everything, Windows, all your apps, all your files, are just the same. It’s also pretty easy to restore any particular file from a backup, you mount the backup as a drive letter, then you can navigate that virtual drive just like any other to find the file(s) you need.
Acronis has saved my butt several times.
I must be misunderstanding you, because even with compression it’s going to be a damn small hard drive that can be backed up to one CD or even DVD with room left over for the boot/restore software. A more sensible setup would be, I think, something like what I use which is the System Rescue CD and an external (or networked) HD. Boot the SysRescCD, mount the backup volume, partimage the create or restore the backups.
Acronis gives me wet dreams…
Another happy Retrospect customer here.
I don’t mind if it spans three or four (or more) DVDs, as long as I can put one of them into the pc, and the pc will use that to start up and restore everything to exactly how it was when the backup was made.
I’ve been testing TeraByte and Acronis for much of this morning. Acronis needs to set up a partition, which I may end up resigning myself to. (I need to learn more about partitions until I’m comfortable using them.)
Looking around (I forget whether it was Google or CNet (i.e., Download.com)) I found TeraByte Image For Windows, and it seems to be exactly what I need. The first time I tried it, it rebooted itself and did the backup in what seemed to be DOS; that is very reassuring, as being outside of Windows will elminate any files-in-use problems. The second time I tried, it made the backup in Windows, so I clearly need to learn more about it. Both times, I put the first of two cds* in the pc and restarted it, and the entrie system got restored before entering Windows. I think we have a winner!
(*At the moment, I have a stack of 50 cds that I bought a while back, which I’m going to use up on this testing. Then I’ll buy some rewritable DVDs.)
Why does Acronis need to create partition? I just tell it a file name to save to and it does it.
Acronis happily runs with Windows running and is still able to access all files, that was my initial attraction to it. Your backup needs to be reliable and easy, or else you won’t keep doing it.
Thanks for the suggestion. I looked them up, and as soon as I saw the manufacturer to be EMC, they immediately got my respect. (There are a lot of good software companies out there, but without brand recognition, it’s hard to know who to trust.)
Unfortunately, the $119 price tag is about double or triple what I can get away with. You (usually) get what you pay for, but that’s more than I can afford this year.
This file name is on a cd/dvd that you could boot from?
One of my goals in this backup plan is the ability to be extremely careful with the programs I’m running. For example, I currently have a lot of stuff in my Startup, and some of it I’m not sure what it is, or if I want it. On my new pc, I plan to monitor the activity fairly frequently, and keep a careful log of every single little thing that I download or install. When something unexpected shows up, my plan will be to copy whatever new data I’ve saved recently (I don’t need a backup program for that), restore my latest backup, and restore the recent data. I ought to end up with a pristine system, with all my data but no unwanted software.
There’s probably a few bugs in that plan which I don’t see. The biggest one, of course, is how good I’ll be at watching the system, and how frequently I’ll actually do the backups. But presuming that I don’t screw up those parts, what do y’all think of my plan?
EMC bought out Dantz, the original folks. Retrospect has been around since Bernoulli cartridges and SyQuests were the backup medium de rigeur.
There are several different “tiers” of Retrospect, and the price is quite a bit higher for backing up a roomful of both PCs and Macs to a networked array of backup devices and administering the entire process centrally, than for the “express” version that is for backing up your own computer to local backup media. $119 sounds overly high for the Express version…
Yeah I thought so. How’s $23 sound?
I’ve never tried to back up to DVDs, I use external USB hard drives. The way I run Acronis is set a backup job to run each Friday and Saturday with a full backup. The file name I specify is c-drive.tib or something like that. Then I set up another job to run an incremental backup Sunday through Thursday. The incrementals are named c-drive2.tib, c-drive3.tib, etc. On Fridays after the full backup runs, I swap backup drives and move one off-site.
When you restore a backup Acronis gives you the option of restoring to any of those incremental points, it lists them by date and time. Acronis can create a bootable recovery CD. If your hard drive dies you stick that CD in and boot from it, and it runs Acronis for you and allows you to access the USB drive with your backup volumes on it, and do a full bootable restore if need be.
Your plan sounds like a science experiment, one that would probably be too tedious for me to keep up with in day-to-day computing when I’m trying to get some work done. But interesting nonetheless! As I mentioned before, you’ve gotta make it easy or it won’t get done.
I use Comodo Backup for backing up to an external USB drive. It’s free and I have had no problems with it, using Windows XP. I use it for scheduled daily incremental backups and weekly full backups of all my data files and settings.