Windows 7: Which backup software, Norton or Microsoft?

Greetings to all,

It's my birthday today, and I was able to acquire a 2Tb external drive.
Now I cannot really decide on which backup program to use.

I have Norton 360 which has an inbuilt backup program, now I'm wondering which backup program to use. The one Norton 360 has or the inbuilt Windows type.



My decision is somewhat in your hands.

Guess it depends upon what you want to backup. For example, I really only care about my data. So, for that, I just use a utility like robocopy to mirror my data directories on my internal hard drive to my external drive. This works well as it only copies files that have changed since the last backup. That's what gets backed up regularly to my external USB drives.

Now, I will occasionally do a system image of my Windows 7 desktop from my C drive to my D drive (different physical hard drives). This I can use to reimage my machine if I somehow blow it up.

The only thing that I keep offsite is my data backups though...these images are just "nice to haves". Not terrible important to me.

One question about backups, does it get updated every time you back up? Such as, when I uninstall a program, the program on the backup is also removed or delete a file.

Depends upon the type of backup that you do. If you are doing a file/folder backup as I do...your backups don't contain anything with regards to your actual programs. I just back up the actual data files.

If you are doing a system image, each time you image it, it would be a snapshot of exactly how your machine looked at that exact moment in time. Therefore, it would be aware of your apps and anything that you recently removed, would be removed in your latest image.

Thank you for your help, I'll add it to your reputation.

Win 7 Backup and Restore is actually two program classes in one.

You have the system image backup which is copy of everything on the partitions which you select and stored in a VHD format.

You also have a folder backup which produces an incremental backup of your selected folders stored in ZIP format.

This is a very general overview. I strongly recommend reading the tutorial by Brink on Win 7 Backup and Restore:
Backup Complete Computer - Create an Image Backup

I use Win 7 Backup and Restore-very successfully.

I am a strong advocate of Win 7 Backup and Restore.

The image backup is not an incremental backup but rather a fresh image.
The one characteristic of Win 7 Backup and Restore which I would like to see changed is that the new image backup overwrites the old. Thus you must rename the old before making a new if you want both. Brink explains this in his tutorial.

I find Acronis to be the best (IMHO)

Lots of extra options and great compression.

I tried using Acronis on my Vista x32 laptop and it constantly consumed 250 MB of RAM and since that was about 50% of the RAM that it took to boot the computer I decided to use a lighter program in the form of Macrium Reflect which runs for just over 15 MB of RAM and has never failed plus thanks to Wishmaster's help and insight I was able to get Reflect x64 to work on my Win 7 desktop.



~Maxx~

Hi there
The FREE version of Macrium reflect doesn't do FILE backup / selective file restore.

I think Acronis is the easiest and fastest package anyway -- the size doesn't matter since if you are doing a full system backup INCLUDING DATA FILES you really don't want to be working on the computer.

Macrium reflect (the free version) doesn't handle spanned media or multi-volume files either and doesn't do Incremental backups either.

Also Acronis allows you to schedule backups automatically and supports other devices like cartridges etc.

Cheers
jimbo

I'll use with Windows Backup and Restore, thank you everyone for your tips.