Suggestion for my backup plan?

It all comes down to how important your data is to you. It would be a PITA if I lost a weeks worth of data on my work machine but I would survive. If I lost a month I'd probably be out of business. On my home machines I don't care. I'd just lay over the image from a fresh install and call it a day. Nothing on it is that important to us. We don't save irreplaceable images of our deceased parents holding their grand kids.

I think any backup solution should be periodically tested for restores and should email or otherwise alert you on completion or failure.

Also, after living through a hurricane that damaged both my office and the secure location of our backups I realize the need to backup to a different geographical location. Fortunatley I didn't have the need but I couldn't even access the backups for over a month.

Live and learn. Do what works for you in your environment.

RolandJS said:

Oh, I may now understand what is meant by automation! Years ago, I worked for a small company, that put in place and invoked, a nightly backup from all data folders from all desktops [and connected laptops] onto a master backup/restore server partition. Is this what you are meaning? That server backup program worked great, only once there was a 2-3 day BATchfile hiccup. One that hiccup was fixed, backups were actually taking place, and such were indeed restorable [folder or file].

That is what I mean, I am doing something similar currently. I have scheduled 6AM incremental backup Acronis every day on my internal disk. I set the schedule once and I do not have to click anything at all in future.

As I heard storing backup in an external disk is a better solution, I thought of plugging in the external disk every night before I sleep, when I am sleeping the scheduled backup can automatically start by itself at 6AM while I am still sleeping. After I wake up, at around 8AM, I can just unplug the external hard disk. No need to waste time clicking any software.

Occasionally, I will manually run the "validate backup archive" in Acronis program to verify the backups are in good condition.

I intend to change to Macrium so I am analysing if Macrium can do the same thing. As I heard incremental backup is not that reliable, I am thinking of doing differential backup, and analysing other solutions Lady Fitzgerald has written. FreeFileSync seems not so friendly with automation and I am not sure how to setup schedule, so I thought of using just Macrium for all backup since Macrium is easier to setup scheduled backup.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

RolandJS said:

...once there was a 2-3 day BATchfile hiccup. One that hiccup was fixed, backups were actually taking place, and such were indeed restorable [folder or file].

You brought up another danger of automated backup systems. If not closely monitored, a hiccup could disable the system and one could go for a long period without any backups being made, often discovering the hiccup only after needing to recover data only to find it isn't there. In most cases, the people who most want to use an automated scheme are going to be the ones least likely to monitor the system to make sure it is working (unless they hire an IT specialist to do the monitoring and system maintenance for them, which most will be too cheap to do).

For my Acronis scheduled backup, if it is unable to complete a backup for that scheduled day, it will popup a message that backup has failed, I guess other software might have some warnings too.

I was thinking if differential backup will be safe (I guess 99% safe) since it only needs the first full backup and the differential backup day that you want to recover data to be in good condition. If the differential backup day is corrupted, the differential backup on day before the corrupted differential backup and the differential backup on the day after the corrupted differential backup would still be likely be in good condition because every differential backup is not "linked" to each other. Differential is only build on the changes since the first full backup. Correct me if I am wrong.