Backup: Something really works!

[walter.sk]

After years of struggling with backups, restores and crashed drives, and a month of fighting with a broken Windows7 and having to do a clean install, I found one really bright spot among the murk.

After rebuilding my C: drive with all of my programs on Win7 64-bits, I checked out Acronis True Image Home 2010, with the Plus Pack, downloaded from their website.  Having some 6 Gb of stuff on my C: drive, I used Acronis to clone the drive to a larger and faster drive.  I thought something went wrong as it finished in less than 15 minutes, but I looked at the destiniation drive and it had the same amount of used space.

This morning I gingerly switched the 2 drives (eSATA) and lo and behold!  The clone drive booted and started my Win7;  all of my programs seem to be working fine except for Vertus Fluid Mask, a Photoshop plug-in.  However, Vertus supplied a way to go back to the other drive, upload to their website the data with my unlock code, switch drives and then have Fluid Mask download the registration data, and it did work.

I am not an Acronis employee or relative, but I sure as heck am an advocate for their simple and rapid cloning software.  I will make other types of backups of other data, but once a week I will re-clone my C: drive and sleep much more easily!

[DarkPenguin]

Buy another drive.

If you are cloning your current drive and it dies during the process you'll have destroyed your backup at your moment of need.  So buy another drive and put them into an every other week rotation.

[walter.sk]

Buy another drive.

If you are cloning your current drive and it dies during the process you'll have destroyed your backup at your moment of need.  So buy another drive and put them into an every other week rotation.

You're right.  But my computer has only 4 drive bays.  I have the C: drive, a C: clone, a data drive only for my pictures, and a backup drive for that.  I have several external drives, and one of them will be an image backup of my C: drive so that if something happens to the C: and the C: clone, I can do a Restore from the external drive.

[Thomas Krüger]

You can also create a bootable USB stick and save your backup on the stick. Plus another backup on a DVD to be on the safe side. Acronis works fine.

Creating Acronis Bootable Media on a USB Flash Drive
http://www.acronis.com/r/support/en/kb/388/flash.html

[JanneAavasalo]

Something that also works well is Macrium Reflect (free and commercial edition available).

Just about an hour ago I did a recovery to one of my computers to restore it to its fresh installation state.

So this is just another alternative to the Acronis.

Janne

[k bennett]

Or buy an external eSATA docking station from OWC, and use bare drives. Easier than opening the computer every week and swapping them out. Keep at least two drives in the rotation.

[BartvanderWolf]

Or buy an external eSATA docking station from OWC, and use bare drives. Easier than opening the computer every week and swapping them out. Keep at least two drives in the rotation.

Just a word of caution, harddrive contacts are not designed for frequent connect/disconnect cycles. One might add another drive to the rotation and increase the frequency if needed.

Cheers,
Bart

[walter.sk]

Just a word of caution, harddrive contacts are not designed for frequent connect/disconnect cycles. One might add another drive to the rotation and increase the frequency if needed.

Cheers,
Bart

I have no plans to swap out the hard drives unless the C: drive goes belly up.  With eSata drives I have found that I can leave the clone drive in its bay, plugged in.  Since I will have an external drive with an image of C: on it as a 2nd backup, I will make a clone of C: to the other internal drive whenever I make major changes to C:, but that won't entail switching out drives.