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#1
Don't Understand Scheduled Backups vs Image Backups
I'm a little confused between the two backups and don't see any tutorials that seem to explain the interaction (if there is any) between the backups I scheduled and the several image backups i have made.
I upgraded my laptop to win 7 about a month ago now. Back on XP I would run a full system backup once every three weeks and run differential backups (& a separate 'system' files backup) every day. Every couple months I would run an ASR backup because as best I can tell that was the only real full system backup. That is the ASR would let me buy a new hard disk, restore from the ASR and have my system back without installing any software etc.
Based on my understanding of windows 7, I thought I would carry that basic idea forward by setting up the scheduled backup including all three logical drives and checking the system image checkbox. Additionally I would occasionally run a separate image backup.
The first issue I have is that as I read the documentation, I should be able to keep several of the image backups because I am putting everything on a USB connected 2T drive (I'm using about 70-80G on the laptop 250G drive). I ran the first image backup after installing win 7 with all current hotfixes and a couple programs as a base (e.g. winzip, acrobat, and an editor). But when I had installed some more software and wanted to do an image backup before trying to install SQL Server 2000 developer, it overwrote that base image backup.
So it appears that I am wrong and only 1 version of an image backup is present? I have read about renaming the directory and have started doing that but I'd like to verify whether my understanding of one and only one image backup is correct even if to an attached drive.
The other issue is the connection between the scheduled backup and the image backups. As noted above I ran a second image backup and overwrote that original base backup. I think (but I'm not sure) the scheduled backup overwrote the image backup today.
Today's backup was the first time the scheduled backup went to another period. As I mentioned above the scheduled backup has the image backup checked. Until now it appeared that the backup was actually something like an incremental backup. but when it went to the new backup time period, I think it overwrote the image backup I had made manually.
The reason I think it overwrote my previous manual backup is that the date/times are now about an hour ago rather than a couple weeks ago.
So I guess my first question is what exactly gets backed up and and where does it go? The scheduled backups seem to be <backupDrive>:\<computername>\Backup Set <timeperiod>. My manual image backups are in <backupdrive>\WindowsImageBackup\<computername>. But it does appear that the system image created as part of today's scheduled backup went in this latter directory.
Is there some coordination between the scheduled backups and the image backup made because I checked that box? Or did I simply ask backup to do two separate and independent operations by checking that box?
Should I rename the image directory right after the scheduled backup makes one or does backup / restore need access to that image for some occasional file restore? How do I know when the scheduled backup is going to make the next image backup? Or do I just constantly manually monitor for it?
thanks
bill