I need to get organized and start backing up my laptop regularly.
I use my own folder layout. Hopefully, One Drive is ignoring my personal work files. I’ve heard bad stories about One Drive.
I need a data backup that lets me select folders and subfolders. I like being able to recover a single, corrupted or deleted file.
That old crap moment when you press Save in a Word Doc with screwed up formatting. Ideally, it would be nice to right click the mouse and see saved versions to restore. Maybe it was modified Jan 3, 7, 9, and 12. I want to remove my errors and go back to Jan 7.
Incremental backups are better. My Internet is sometimes sluggish. There’s no need to backup a file that’s already saved on the server. Backup new and changed files.
How should a backup handle deleted files?
They are deleted locally on the hard drive. Where should they go on the server? How long should they stay there?
Do I need an image disc backup? Let’s say that blue smoke comes out of my laptop. I want to buy a new laptop and restore my drive as painlessly as possible.
My previously purchased software should be registered and ready to use. My folders and all the files should be available. Just like the hardware failure never happened.
Assuming you are using the Office 365 version of Word, OneDrive already does this and auto-saves continuously. You can revert to any point in time.
You can setup both Work and Personal OneDrive folders in the Office apps and Windows. Only the folders in each instance get backed up to that instance.
Buy an external hard drive and “manually” copy the folders you want to save on a regular basis. You might need to reorganize your folder structure to simplify this process to minimize the number of folders to be saved.
It’s trivial to write scripts to run every e.g. 5 minutes and back up anything in your folders of interest that’s changed in that time. The OP is/was in IT and this would probably be trivial for them. That’s definitely old school, and does nothing to make restoring point-click easy. But it can sure solve the problem of not having every version of every file of interest.
Probably not what you’re looking for, but I use a Synology back up drive with their software. You can easily set it to back up on whatever schedule you want it to and using a few different strategies. Plus, you can then set it to back itself up somewhere else.
And, since it also works as a server I set up a “My Documents” folder on it, with a shortcut to my desktop and treat it like I’d treat a local My Documents folder. Then everything goes directly to backup drive, but more importantly, when I get a new computer, I just put the shortcut on the desktop of the new computer and everything is right there for me.
Another feature that it’s designed to do, but I don’t use, is act like a cloud server, similar to Google Drive where you can work on the files while they’re on the drive. That’s confusing, what I mean is the way Google has it’s own suite of Office type apps (Google Docs, Google Sheets etc), so does this. But like google, it’s a proprietary format, so that was sort of a dead end for me WRT using it.
ETA because I saw your last post. WRT streaming, a lot of people use it as a plex server. Not something I’ve ever done or even looked at, but I see a lot of people talking about it and it does have a Plex Server app.
I use iDrive, which was highly rated by multiple sources when I researched backup options. It gives you 5 TB of backup storage for $70 / year, and lets you backup multiple computers. (There’s also a “mini” version that gives you 100 GB for $3 / year, but that’s probably too small for any real world use case). I’ve had to restore files a few times and it’s always worked fine. I’ve never tried streaming from it; I don’t know if it supports that.
I use BackBlaze. They have a free, manual, limited space offering if you just wanted to backup, say, documents manually, but I use their automated paid version. You can remove certain file types and folders, but they encourage you to just let it do its thing.
I’ve long used Macrium Reflect. Unless their policy has changed you should be able to get a free version, but you may have to dig for it as their main page just offers a 30-day trial on the paid versions.
The free version does both image backups and disk cloning, and can do differential backups but not incrementals. The paid version adds incremental backup capability and also a “file and folders” mode that I find unnecessary and would never use. Backup images can be mounted as virtual drives and all the files it contains can be browsed, so you can recover individual files.
Macrium can create rescue media either on CD or on a USB stick, however last time I did this I found it was necessary to first create a primary partition on the USB stick with Diskpart and set it active, then format in FAT32, then run through the media creation process with Macrium.
I’ll pay a reasonable price for a fully implemented backup software solution.
Laptops are so vulnerable. People carry them carelessly, prop them up on any flat surface, or their lap. They get dropped.
A tower pc sits on the floor and never moves. I’ve read hard drive standards have significantly declined. Seagate is no longer the gold standard?
Backups are even more important to recover from failed hardware. Dell Laptops are cheaply priced. $650 to $850 for Windows 11 pro models. It’s the software and data that’s valuable.
I guess you still have to fix the software licenses after recovering to a new laptop?
I remember Microsoft and other companies used to give some leeway. The authenticator was looking for publicly posted licenses that were installed and abused. Ebay sellers would include licenses that way.
I wonder if Microsoft will even tolerate 2 uses of the license? One on a dead laptop and another on a new one. A support center phone call may be required.
This is exactly what I do. It is a 5-minute process; I simply drag the folders I want backed up over to the external drive.
You have to be disciplined and do it on the regular, and you have to, as Steven noted, be organized, file/folder-wise. Probably not practical if you require daily back-ups.
OEM keys are now burnt into the BIOS of laptops, so they auto-activate at install. Retail keys still allow for multiple activations, but Microsoft doesn’t not tell you how many uses or the allowed frequency of changes in hardware.
I use both of these; Backblaze is running constantly, doing continuous backups of the entire drive and the external drive. And then, at month-end, I use Macrium Reflect to backup both the internal and external drives to a portable external drive (actually to more than one; so that there are multiple redundant copies).
This is all overkill but I had a failed drive a decade ago or so. Note that if you use Backblaze and you need to restore a large amount of data, I believe they will send you an external drive containing your backup.
I’m analytical and OCD about my folder structure. It helps my work flow and efficiency to use structure throughout all my projects.
I may rename a local hard drive Folder from wrk to MyWork for example. Trivial change. But that abbreviation is distracting and annoying when I should be concentrating on work.
Now, Wrk folder is on the cloud backup.
The Next time my backup runs, MyWork folder will live on the Cloud Server.
You notice my problem?
Yes, I have two copies of the same files on my Cloud. Even worse, Wrk is now obsolete and the files outdated.
