What is your backup situation at home?

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Ok, well let me know when writing to ROM chips becomes consumer accessible for large amounts of storage :lol:

I suspect you are on your own with this one.
 


Who knows ... maybe one day it will happen ...
 


the kid is quadriplegic, the wife can walk... that's why my order is like that. :wink
 


They still are a thing.

The company I work for handles certain sensitive data which cannot be backed up to any cloud based storage, we still use robotic Tape librarys for certain backups.
 
I admit to having the attention span of a flea. My back-up habits are pretty much the same.

I have a stack of about 8-10 HDD's of various ages and sizes with WinXP Win7 on them with a lot of redundant files made over the years that could be used in my external dock should I need to look up something lost off the two current towers in use.

The homegrown tower has Win7 with 4 SSD's. It's the workhorse with the currently used files and files of import. The second tower, the Inspiron, has 2 HDD's. One has WinXP, used for my architectural program that I couldn't afford to upgrade when Win7 came out and the native drive that came in the box with that free upgrade to Win10, which I never use.

My real backup has always been CD's. Now I realize that there is a file size restriction, but the important files - financial, pics and other things that I have accumulated since my first box in '89- are small enough to use CD's. And I like the fact that I have physical copies in my hands and not in some far away server in the imaginary sky subject to forces beyond my control.

For the larger architectural files, I have them on 2 or 3 outside the box drives somewhere in my drive pile.

Someday when I get some coin I'll replace my homegrown with some current tech and set it up with a nice nas setup. Getting kind of tired of my Pentium-D. :)


 
Windows Server 2012R2 with 8 x 3 TB hard drives in RAID 6 array - backs up the 5 PCs in my home nightly. Each PC has a bootable USB drive from which the latest entire client PC can be restored to a bare metal replacement.

It is also my media server with hundreds of movies, thousands of songs, etc. All of the RAID data has a local backup to protect in case of accidental deletion or storage failure. For everything except the movies, external media is in periodic rotation to a separate physical location - my personal records and photos will not be lost in a house fire.
 
I have 2 computers running Windows 7 Pro 64bit. The newer one has an extra internal HHD for System Image back-ups and storage and the older one has an external HHD for System Image back-ups and storage.
 
Win 7 PC.

5 x Raid 1 pair hard drives. They copy the data from one pair to another.

Then once a season I burn the entire backup to blue ray discs.
Also copy it all to external usb hard drive.
 


I tried using Macrium Reflect since I heard so many good things about it. However, since I downloaded their free version I discovered that there is no support and not all of its features are available in the free version; there's not even a forum of theirs that I could join to get my questions answered. So I'm about to use AOMEI Backupper Pro, which I was able to recently get for free from a 'giveaway' site. I heard many good things about Backupper over the years and intend to use their differential feature since I've read that incremental backups could more easily get hosed if one of the increments is bad (and you only get to discover it when in the midst of a restore - ouch!).

But what I'd really like to get is an understanding of MS's policy of restoring to a different device. ie, if my PC gets totally fried (I do live in FL, 'the lightning capitol of the world') and it's not just a new HDD that I need, but a complete mobo, how do I get permission form MS to allow me to do the restore without them thinking that I'm trying to violate their license agreement (which I'm not since the old PC is now dead and I just want to use the license on a brand new PC). I'd really like to see a decent explanation of what I just described.
Thanks!
Dan
 


Yes, the free version of Macrium is lacking some features. Why would they give you everything for free?

As far as a new machine, we have two considerations: Operation and Licensing.

Operation - Will it boot and run.
A new motherboard is a whole different system. An image (with whatever tool) simply may fail to boot up with the new hardware.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.
So..always be prepared for if you have to do a full reinstall.

Licensing -
MS sees a new motherboard as a new 'system'. There are other things, but the motherboard is the main thing.
Whether you have to do a reinstall or simply recover an image, or use the old HDD as is...it will become deactivated upon seeing the new hardware.

If you're on Win 10, you're probably OK.
Link your Win 10 OS license to a Microsoft account, and you can usually use that same 'digital entitlement' on new hardware.
Read and do this before. Like do it now:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/20530/windows-10-reactivating-after-hardware-change
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3164428/windows-build-1607-activation.html

Pre-Win10, you're at the mercy of whoever you talk to at MS. But for a broken and replaced motherboard or system, they are usually very lenient about reusing that license. Or they just give you a new one.
 
On Windows 7 at least (can't speak about 8) if you reinstall / recover to a new Motherboard then it will say your Windows is deactivated and be just like you had fresh installed it on a PC. Automatic activation will probably fail and you'll need to call MS up and tell them the situation. As USAFRet said they are pretty generous when it comes to these situations and will normally give you a new key.

MS gets most of it's OS money from selling to OEM's, so their really only concerned about making sure those OEM's don't attempt to whitebox them with the assumption that the user will just run a black market Windows. So their corporate and business policies are draconian but they tend to treat single consumers fairly well, within the limit of the call centers ability that is.
 
I have 38 drives not including SSDs. They're 3-8TB drives mostly I've got a couple 2TBs but the rest are 3TB & Larger. BUs are absolutely essential for me.
All my primary drives are internal SATA drives I back each one up to an external USB drive of the same size
(ie 3TB SATA to a 3TB USB 3.0 drive 8TB SATA to 8TB USB 3.0 etc.)
The Backups for these drives is not automatic. They are collections of various stuff and when I actually add stuff, move stuff around or delete stuff I manually run a mirror backup to their external counterpart.
(Once you do it the first time it just updates the changes on subsequent backups.)
The rest of the time these drives are all unplugged.

For my OS drive I've got a bunch of different backups some automatic and some manual. I have an automatic BU every 3 days of all the files on my windows machines that customize my systems. ie: things like bookmarks, start menu, appdata (only the customizations I've made to the apps I have installed. ini files and the like. It's different files for different applications some proprietary), Windows Desktop, My Documents etc.

I have another BU called "New Windows Installation" which would be used If I need to do a new installation of Windows should that be necessary where I BU all the stuff from my windows drive I customize (Which is A LOT of stuff. My systems have over 160 applications. Take FF for example. I currently have 91 add-ons in FF which all take their own customizing.)
(I have several FF backups taking place, some on a schedule and some manually. I tend to run 4 FF Windows with 100 or more tabs so I find it useful to have frequent FF backups since there's a lot changing there all the time)

I've got "My Documents" backing up to two different drives on different schedules sometimes you want to go earlier than your last BU this lets me do that when I need to.
I backup all these Windows Backups for all my networked systems to another USB drive so I have a Backup of my backups which means I can't lose my backups of this critical stuff.
(I just do this for the Windows stuff, I don't have backups of my backups of the 38 HDD that would be unnecessarily expensive)(Not to mention a nuisance finding a reasonable place to put all those extra drives that can actually reach the PCs they're supposed to be connected to)

The weak point in my BU strategy is actually backing up Windows to an image so I can just get immediately back up an running from a cloned copy of my Windows installation or a disk image or something. Right now I've been just making an actual clone of my Windows SSD to an identical SSD. The problem with this is it's a pain to do and takes more of my time than I'd like.
I would prefer a solution that just makes an image of the Windows drive on a schedule while I'm still using Windows but I haven't come across that perfect scenario yet.

I would be interested in peoples suggestions for a cloning or imaging solution that you have personal experience that it works on a restore operation. I've read about quite a few that are supposed to be good but people say the restore fails so... Not at all helpful. I WAS using EaseUS ToDo Backup but started reading all these testimonials where people were saying the restore operation does not work. I never actually had occasion to try to see if it works before I stopped using it (Due to all the testimonials saying it doesn't work).

Cheers from Canada


 


My personal procedure, from the first post in this thread....works.
And actually tested to recover from that backup image.

Each physical drive gets backed up to its own folder. On a schedule depending on the need for that particular device or drive.
For instance...the 2 drives in my HTPC (128GB SSD's) get a Full backup once a week.
The drives (5 x SSD) in my main system get a Full or Incremental backup every night. Each physical drive to a specific folder on the NAS, at different hours during the night. 2AM, 3AM, 4AM....

I also have an image of all systems with their Day 0 OS install. And another image of those systems, with my standard load of applications.

To fully recover any individual drive takes maybe 20 minutes. And it can be recovered from any daily state in the last 14 days.

The entire NAS itself gets backed up weekly, to a USB connected drive of sufficient size. That takes maybe 3 hours, all automated. At the end of that process, the NAS automatically disconnects that 8TB drive. Nothing can see it or mess up the data. It is 100% offline.
My only manual procedure is to power cycle the external enclosure every Wednesday morning, to wake up the drive and let the NAS access it.

Currently, my NAS data consumes ~6.5TB. Backed up to an 8TB drive in a 4 bay USB enclosure.
As the NAS data increases, I can split the weekly backup between the current 8TB, and some other new drive(s) in that same 4 bay enclosure.
 
Wow USAFRet that really is a good strategy. I especially like how your NAS disconnects itself from your USB drive so it's completely offline.
I don't really need incremental backups on the drives I'm just mirroring and I don't think it would work anyway. Space is an issue in my situation I'm afraid.
My 3-8TB drives and their backup drives are all almost completely full. Less than 50GB free on almost all of them.

I would like to make a backup that kept maybe 5 to 10 copies of certain files or folders like "My Documents" for example. I would like to have a bunch of prior versions or these files in case something goes wrong. How would I do that?
Because with the mirror backups they put new or changed files on the destination drive and then remove the old versions and sometimes with spreadsheets that are massively interconnected you can change something that has implications elsewhere and you may not find out about it for a while and by the time you find out the only copies you have are also corrupted by now and it can be a bit of a pain to figure these things out sometimes so it's much easier to just go back to an uncorrupted version.

I think Incremental would work for that but I've never actually used an incremental backup because it's kind of messy. Mirror BUs give me an exact copy so I can access exactly the file or files I need easily in the case of a failure. Also I don't actually need to do a restore with mirror BUs I just use the alternate drive and it's already an exact copy.
I just haven't liked the many partial backups I guess. But I can see how that can be advantageous in terms of saving space and time.
 
I'm still making full images using my Macrium Reflect 6, however, I have heard Macrium Reflect 7 (paid version's immediately available, free version is out there yet?) has greatly improved the incremental and differential backup and restore functions: better, faster.
 


This is true. I purchased v6, and got a free upgrade to v7.
The rolling Incremental works great. A Full image, then xx days of small incrementals, then xx+1 it gets rolled into the next Full image.
Auto deleting the old incrementals as it goes.
 
I created an app to maintain my own backups as I wasn't happy with any of the tools that I found generally available.

BackupCat (currently Windows only) is independent of the backup hardware and keeps your data files continuously and automatically backed up as you work, to a second, NAS or remote drive, and is designed to run unobtrusively in the background without slowing down other applications or requiring user intervention for regular use.

It has a free-for-personal-use licence, for further information and downloads please see ccgi.cjseymour.plus.com/software.htm
 
"...keeps your data files continuously and automatically backed up as you work, to a second, NAS or remote drive..."
Very good backup idea! One question -- what will you do if your computer gets hit with ransomware or virus or malware -- which hits internal and external devices?
 


As long it doesn't hit your backup drive, simply just remove it with something like HitmanPro, ESET Online Scanner, or Malwarebytes Anti Malware.

If you finish backing up to your backup drive, disconnect it from the PC. You don't need to leave it there while not doing anything but just waste power to keep it on.
 
It wouldn't be "continuously and automatically backed up" if you disconnected the remote/NAS drive?

@RolandJS makes a great point though..... if it's being "continuously and automatically backed up", any virus/malware that infiltrates, will also hit the NAS etc in short order.

@HardyMcHardFace would this program keep multiple backups over a period of time? Or is each "new" backup overriding the previous?
 


I don't like continuously and automatically backed up feature, I like manual backup more because I can disconnect the drive after finish backing it up. I backup using Samsung Data Migration USB 3.0 and Samsung 250GB SSD.
 
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