Topic: Do you back up your computer?

[scottws]

As someone in an IT career, I have seen data get lost many, many times.  Drives fail and they weren't backed up or the backups weren't running.  Users left important files on their desktop even though they were warned the desktop isn't a safe place to store data because it doesn't reside on the file servers that are backed up.  Years of family photos are stored only on an external drive and someone's niece trips on the USB cable, sending the drive flying.

Whatever the case might have been, more and more these sorts of anecdotes have been reminding me of the 8 GB of pictures, 35 GB of music, 200 GB of videos, and all the other data that I have that is either difficult to replace or entirely irreplaceable.  Not all of it is truly important, but a lot is.  With very large hard drives being so cheap and the very fact that I got a 1 TB external drive for Christmas, I decided that it is time to start doing backups.

That said, I don't know what program to use.  I looked into the solution bundled with Windows 7:  Windows Backup and Restore.  Lots of people seem to hate that it isn't like ntbackup anymore and is more of an image backup program like Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost.  However, with a 1 TB external, that doesn't bother me too much.  The killer seems to be that the way it is programed now.  It is essentially broken.  It is supposed to take a full backup and then do incrementals after that, but there is an issue in how it chooses files for the incremental backups.  It decides what files to back up based on the ChangeTime NTFS attribute.  It turns out that on Windows 7, this attribute is updated by the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service after every reboot or resume for any files within the Public hierarchy.  In terms of size, the biggest chunk of my data is in there.  You can disable this service, but then in breaks things like Windows Media Center Extenders and I use my Xbox 360 as one.  So this is out.

I have a copy of Nero Back-It-Up 4.  However, it doesn't support Windows 7.  It supports volume shadow copies, but it rarely was able to back up from shadow copies under Vista and it doesn't even let me enable the feature on Windows 7.  Instead of fixing the program, Nero has released Back-It-Up & Burn, but I have no interest in that based on the problems I had with its precursor and the way they abandoned it almost immediately after I got it (though, admittedly, I got it free with a copy of Nero 9... now I know why they had the promotion).

I see that there are a fair number of other programs out there, but I'm not sure which ones are good.  Anyone have any experience backing up files or volumes on Windows 7?

[iPPi]

I used to not back up.  However, I recently got a 1TB external drive as well and have backed up all my files.  I don't ghost or image my HDD though as I don't have software installed that is important enough for me to consider I need an entire image of my computer.  I just backup data files.

I'd say it's good timing too for me.  My computer is near four years old and it's starting to have issues.  I'm going to need to buy a new computer in the near future.

[Pugnate]

I get a new drive every two to three years, so I guess I face little risk.

[Quemaqua]

I always feel like I should back stuff up and it never happens.  There's too much time and expense to back up large amounts of data.  I usually just back up a few important things onto DVDs and such and if I lose the rest, oh well.

[ren]

I backup my laptop onto an external hard drive about once a week and then whenever I visit my parents I dump the contents of that external onto one of the computers their. So at any given time I should have everything in at least three places. I didn't used to backup that much but now that I do most of my purchasing through downloads it made sense to start.

I use syncback to do my backups. It's probably not what you're looking for though. It doesn't make an image of the drive, it just backs up the folders I tell it to. All I backup is my documents, music, videos, pictures and installation files.

[Ghandi]

I would but I'm too lazy.

[MysterD]

I always feel like I should back stuff up and it never happens.  There's too much time and expense to back up large amounts of data.  I usually just back up a few important things onto DVDs and such and if I lose the rest, oh well.

Sounds like me.

There's a ton of patches; game saves; and full games from Steam that I should back-up (so I don't gotta re-DL huge games - i.e. GTA4 PC) - but yeah, some of it, I just ain't backed-up.

Though, since I often lately been scrounging for HD space, I been backing-up way more than usual.

Still, not enuff as I probably should, though.

[Cobra951]

I keep everything I care about in 2 places, in particular documents, photos and music.  I don't back up much as a specific task.  Whenever I add an album or new photos, I also add them to the same directory structure in another physical drive.  Same for docs.  At least one of the drives is always external.

I do like to image my system drive now as well.  It's been a while since I did that last, though.

[TheOtherBelmont]

I back up my music and video files every couple of months on my external HD.  I'll probably be doing it again here soon when I build the new computer this week (hopefully).

[scottws]

I keep everything I care about in 2 places, in particular documents, photos and music.  I don't back up much as a specific task.  Whenever I add an album or new photos, I also add them to the same directory structure in another physical drive.  Same for docs.  At least one of the drives is always external.

I do like to image my system drive now as well.  It's been a while since I did that last, though.

You should get a program that auto-syncs changes like that automatically.  Something like Memeo backup.  I'm doing a trial of Acronis True Image Home 2010 and it seems to have a feature like that too called "non-stop backup".

[Cobra951]

Cool!  It makes sense that someone would automate this.  It makes more sense to me than restoring from backup files.  Just switch to the other data drive if one goes bad.  Never heard of Memeo.  I'll look it up.  I've had a good experience with Acronis, as you know.