Windows 7 I'm losing faith in back up software!

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

A while back I posted about how my Norton Ghost didn't work when I finally needed it.

Well, to day when messing around in Disk Management in relation to reinstalling Windows 8 which has also stopped working I through negligence deleted the wrong partition.

Instead of the Windows 8 partition I deleted a partition I save some old data on that I don't want to lose.

No big deal, I always back everything up.

So I open Acronis which I got after ditching Ghost.

Now Acronis says it can't read the backup file that it created.
After a lot of messing around I got some information on their web site none of which applies and gave up.

Fortunately I didn't trust them either.
I also just copied the whole partition uncompressed to the external hard drive as well.

It's in the process of copying them back to the partition right now, that's why I'm killing time writing this.

I think from now on I'll keep backup of Windows (which it can see) and for everything else I'll just copy stuff to my back up media and not depend on any backup software.

I have everything on my computer backed up to more then one external hard drive but I still get hyper about losing things.

Mike

 

[patcooke]

Surprised you've had problems with Acronis - but there again the pc is an altar to Sod's Law! I've written on here before of a crc/read error or something on a backup when it is critically needed. That's why I keep the most recent three generations of backup on an internal drive and a copy of all of them on a usb drive - it pays to be paranoid in this business!

 

[whs]

In the 'old days' I had trouble with Ghost too. But since I use free Macrium, I never had a problem. And I restore systems often because I always muck things up. Right now I am restoring one of my laptops. The Windows 7 C: partition was mucked up by Windows 8 that I am running from a USB stick. Have to figure out how that happened.

And I use 1 internal disk (on desktops) and 2 external disks. Macrium can make images to USB3 disks but cannot restore from them. So I always have to switch the enclosure. But eSata disks work well.

 

[john3347]

I have been particularly happy with Windows Home server as an on site back up device. It has saved my butt more than a couple of times since it went public. I have tried a couple of the so much a year third party back-up software products and have had no luck with them. WHS and external hard drives is my back-up plan.