Windows 7: Your maintenace plan?

What is your maintenace plan? I mean all the stuff, backup, updating, antivirus, firewall etc.

I have about 15 Gb of photograps, and rapidly growing. I have two separate HDD's, and I backup those files daily basis to another HDD by SyncToy. Same thing with personal documents and favorites. I have MP3's also, all ripped from my own CD's. I back them daily also, though I could rip them when ever again.

I run disk defrag: %windir%\system32\defrag.exe /c /u /v /x on every startup.

So how about better backup plan? That I have not yet implmented.

What else are you doing to keep system up ang healthy?

I don't want to use more money on software, so I'd like to manage things with OS's stuff.

I have McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.7.0i, updates at startup.

I keep my computer shut down when I'm not doing something with it. I also have VMware Server 2.0.1 and couple of VM's in it. Thats mainly for training and fun.

I use OS's own firewall with factory settings.

Any suggestions?

One thing you might want to add is an off site backup. If you ever had a fire/flood your backup would also be under water.

Another, is to backup to 2 kinds of media, so if you dvd player goes down you have a way of restoring.

Ken

1). I use a dedicated file server box at home for all of my data and simply map drives to this server from my workstations. I don't install programs or otherwise on the server. It just sits in the back room of the basement and runs.

2). My server has 2 hard drives installed. 1 running the OS with a partition dedicated to data. 3 shares on the data partition. a) music b) data c) downloads. Every 12 hours I run a backup job using robocopy to copy all of the data from my 3 shares to the second hard drive on the server. My music is all from my own cd's as well, but I'd rather back them up instead of having to rip them again.

3). Once per week, I manually attach an external drive and run a different robocopy job which mirrors the external drive to what is on my storage partition

4). Also, about every 2 weeks, I manually attach another external hard drive and run robocopy and mirror the external drive to what is on my storage partition. This drive is stored off-site in my work desk drawer.

5). On the days that I take my offsite storage home, I first bring in the other drive from home. This way I'm never in a position where all of my drives and backup are in the house at the same time.

Until very recently I've never backed up in my 22 year life.

Anyways, as far as maintenance goes, the yearly reinstall works well. I back up to an external hard drive. I run ccleaner occasionally (not on Windows 7, as I don't know how compatible it is yet), disk defrag as well (used defragler, but same issue now though). I presume that the odds of both my hard drives failing at the same time are somewhat low, and I don't have too much of value, just a bunch of old documents I haven't looked at in a year and a large collection of pictures I've drawn or edited.

There's a couple much simpler options. I ahve 22 hd's in my main computer. Multiple raid6 array's covers drive failure. if you're worried about corruption, how about something like a nightly backup with software like acronis true image? if you're talking irreplacable data, there shouldn't be that much you need to back up, that a simple extra drive can't back up. I have 10tb of drive space, I don't back up all of it. It's just not worth while. With my web server, I have redundant machines, and additional alternate machines in a different data center. You have those options too, though they're pretty extreme for the standard user.

Works fine for me, it did on the Beta and R.C.

I have a 300GB that I backup to once a month, CCleaner every other day, and a reformat once a year.

Run ESET Smart Security V4 AntiVirus+AntiSpyware+Firewall (really light, doesnt slow down PC and never had a virus get through it)
Disk Defrag once every few days.
Ccleaner every day (Right click recycle bin-->Run Ccleaner)
Uninstall ALL Programs in Revo unistaller in advanced mode instead of normal windows uninstaller (VERY Helpful)
Do a weekly scan for malware with Malwarebytes Anti-malware (been doing this for a year, never detected anything) ESET handles everything.
Do disk cleanup every month.
Enable System restore.
Keep Games on E:\ Partition, music and pictures on D:\, Programs (portable programs ) On H:\. This way if I haft to re-install for any reason I have all my pictures, music, most programs and all my games =)

Yea, Windows 7 runs as fast as the day I installed it. When I had NO programs installed, NO AntiVirus, No nothing.
Windows XP and Vista wouldn't do the same!
Windows 7 FTW!

And a power surge, fire, flood, or theft could result in losing all of that instantly.

Out of curiosity, what exactly do you fill up that kind of space with?? I've worked for numerous companies with Storage Area Networks like EMC and NetApp that didn't have that much disk space.