[Ham-Computers] Harddrive question

[John and Linda Miller]

Brian -  Take your time and search.  There are lots of backup styles.  Sometime ago I was doing what you must now be doing.  I asked as many questions as I could from as many people as possible.

I knew that I was NOT interested in a doing a full, lengthy system backup any more often than I needed to.  My gear does not run 24/7.

I use Eazy Backup (www.ajsystems.com) for my hourly, daily, or weekly applications backups (or archives, they mean the same).  That's the most flexible applications backup I've found for my in-process work.  I use three versions of Eazy on three vintages of Windows machines.  If I am working on something really, really important, I do an hourly archive.  If it isn't quite so important, it's daily.  Most of the time it is weekly.  My determination of whether to use hourly, daily or weekly is based upon the difficulty to restore in the event of a catastrophe.

Mike has already suggested Ghost and Acronis.  To that I would encourage you to look at Paragon here:

http://drive-backup.com/

Ghost (or similar products) make a complete copy of the disk - including all of the operating system files and programs (...well, it is not really a complete copy as the blank space is not copied).  With respect to Ghost I found it to work ONLY when you are moving from 
one configuration to the EXACTLY same configuration, and I mean 
EXACTLY.  

Ghost is often used by PC manufacturers to deploy systems.  For example, the manufacturer would configure a system exactly the way it should be when shipped.  Then, (a) "Ghost" would be used to copy the disk; (b) the Ghost copy would be "restored" to a new disk (the exact same type of disk as used when the copy was made;  (c) the disk would be installed into the new system ... ready to ship.

In a business that ran machines 24/7, Ghost might be deployed to make copy (also known as an image) of the entire system every morning at 0200 when nobody was there.  In a tax business, I have seen one image made at 0100 and another at 0300, as extra "insurance" on separate hard drives, when everyone was kicked off the primary system.

As mentioned, the problem with a Ghost type backup is that it is really only easy to restore to the a system of the same configuration.

You likely could not, for example, restore the Ghost made on a desktop machine to a laptop machine.  With desktop to desktop, I have seen Ghost fail for the slightest configuration variation.

I have used Ghost and I am not a fan of the product.

I have used Acronis and also Paragon.  Neither Acronis or Paragon are finicky about differences.  In my experience, whatever is copied (or imaged) is fully restored.  Their technical service is excellent.  Both restored EVERYTHING from one computer to another.

Like Phil, I once wanted to move everything from a small hard drive in a desktop to a much larger hard drive in a laptop.  No problem.  Acronis did it.  My computer club used Paragon to reverse the process, and that worked, too.  I think Phil keeps a spare C: drive "ready to go" all the time.  That's certainly the way to go if time is of the essence.

With my Acronis, and I could switch to Paragon tomorrow and be just a happy, I do a new full system archive only when something major in the system has changed.

Hope this helps.

John W0IKT