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#1
Why bother with OS-level backup (and other thoughts on backup strategy
I've been rethinking my backup strategy at home (or lack of it, to be more precise) and came to these conclusions (I only need to backup one computer running Windows 7 x64):
1) Why bother with OS backup at disk image level?
I just don't see a point in doing OS backup at disk image level at home. Within past 15 years I could've benefited of it once. Since I didn't have it I spent about a day and a half re-installing OS from scratch, which I was OK with plus it's always good to reinstall OS from scratch to get rid of accumulated "crud"
Other reasons why this is a hassle:
2) What software to do it with?
I just don't trust anything that claims to be able to backup OS while it is running. To do this backup program has to integrate itself with Windows at OS level, install drivers and/or services that run all the time and consume CPU resources and often mess up whole OS. Just check out review for Acronis 2012 at Amazon - 2.5 out of 5 (~100 reviews). The other popular contender is Macrium that has 3.5 out of 5 at Download.com. IMO anything under 4.8 is not acceptable for the backup application. Please recommend if you know something better.
So the only feasible option is to use some kind of bootable media and backup when OS is not running. This takes a long time and you can't use your computer until it is done and backup is verified. Plus it still takes large amounts of disc space. As of now my compressed OS image would be about 40 GB. Say you do this once a week - this is 160GB per month, which will add up fast.
Do this less often? Might as well not do this at all. Or maybe only keep a couple latest images - this way it won't eat up disk space that fast.
3) Do you trust the restore of OS level backup?
OK, so you did backup and verified it (that is files were compared with originals on disk). But you don't really know if your backup will work until you restored it (on a different disk, because you don't want to mess up your primary OS) and used your OS for while. Who has time/patience to do this? So you won't. So why even bother backing it up?
Does anybody do their OS level restore often enough to comment on reliability of some consumer level backup applications?
So my conclusion is that OS image backup is not worth it in my case. Please let me know if I miss something (that is if OS image backup saves you anything but time) .
And this brings us to the second part of my post - Data Backup at file level.
4) One must backup your own data. There is no way around it. The only question is to come up with efficient backup strategy (and keep in mind that you have no backup until you restored it)
What I need for my purposes seem to be some kind of glorified file copier/verifier (paid applications are OK). The closest thing to this that I found is SyncBack Pro (SyncBackPro - powerful computer backup software. The power user's backup software. , has free version as well). You can read about all features on the website but in a nutshell it allows me to ZIP a bunch of files with a password and upload this ZIP to FTP and/or cloud services like Amazon S3 or Google storage. I haven't found if it in itself supports MD5 (or other checksum) verification but if I use ZIP this is not an issue since ZIP archive can always be verified and verification can be easily scripted/automated.
Are there any other applications like this that don't install any crud that runs in the background?
5) What to backup?
I am looking for guides on what personal data to backup at file level. I can think of "My Documents", browser bookmarks, Outlook .PST file, Photos, Music, a couple SQL Server databases that I use for development (my source code is backed up via separate backup process at SVN repository level). Am I forgetting something important? Of course it will be unique for everybody but I am asking about "universal" stuff here that everybody needs to backup.