Favorite Backup Software

Mellon Head said:

whs said:

Thanks Mellon Head, that was a useful overview. Most of your problems would not apply to me, so I guess I will dare to do it. I have a relatively muscular system, so resource usage is not a concern.

No prob. I really liked the Norton series. I've used it for about 10 years now in one form or other. It's been a pretty good product, and NIS2010 isn't nearly the resource hog that 2009 was. I'd still use it except for the SONAR thing. It's too aggressive, IMO, and Symantec doesn't seem to have a fix for that. If they fix it, then I'll probably use it again.

I'd do it if I were you, too. A big long license like that. Why not? :)

Since you are now going the MSE route, I would suggest a couple of precautions:

1. Do a scan with SAS (Superantispyware) every 3 days or so. It was SAS that caught the trojan and browser highjacker in my system that MSE had missed.
2. Image, image, image. I take an automatic image every morning when I boot the system. That goes to a folder on an internal HDD. For my system and data partitions (on the SSD) it takes only 8 minutes for both.
Then every Sunday I transfer the latest image to a weekly image folder on an external disk. And every first Sunday in the month I transfer an image to a monthly folder to another external disk that is normally detached from the system.
Thus I have 3 levels of images and I can go back to any point in time all the way back to the initial installation. And with the montly image folder being off-line, I can be 100% sure that nothing will happen to that one.
I use free Macrium, but any other imaging program will do the job too.

That's good advice, thanks. I've been using Malware Bytes as a secondary, but maybe I'll check out SAS. Have you used MB? If so, how does it compare?

I'm definitely going to check out Macrium, because I'm not fond of the imaging on Windows Backup.

Mellon Head said:

That's good advice, thanks. I've been using Malware Bytes as a secondary, but maybe I'll check out SAS. Have you used MB? If so, how does it compare?

I'm definitely going to check out Macrium, because I'm not fond of the imaging on Windows Backup.

Yes I have use MB as well as SAS. In my specific case MB found nothing but SAS found the buggers. I sometimes use both and they both find what the other did not. Never hurts to scan. I just let it run in the background - no need to stop everything because you are scanning - unless you have a Pentium3, LOL.

I have XP Home on C: and Windows 7 on D: on a Samsung NC20 netbook. I dual-boot, usually to Wndows 7. How does the warning regarding the MBR apply/not-apply in my situation?

Thanks
- Tom

I have settled on Macrium Free. It is easy to use with a great GUI.
The main feature I like is the ability to restore one partition on a HDD without disturbing the data on other partitions on the same drive. From what I have read Windows Backup and Paragon will overwrite the entire disk and the additional partitions will be blank.

I have two partitions on my HDD. One for the OS which I image and one for data files which I use a Sync program to back it up since it changes a lot.

Jim

Macrium is a good app. - I am pleased you are happy with it.

Windows Sys image is not easy to control, as you point out.

However other 3rd party apps. like Paragon, and others, ALL allow you to restore a single partition to any location without disturbing the other partitions.

SIW2 said:

Macrium is a good app. - I am pleased you are happy with it.

Windows Sys image is not easy to control, as you point out.

However other 3rd party apps. like Paragon, and others, ALL allow you to restore a single partition to any location without disturbing the other partitions.

Unfortunately I can not remember what other program I ran into that would wipe the other partitions. I know Windows Backup does it and I was reading the step by step restore procedure on another product and ran across the same problem. Most of the information showed you could do a partition restore but after reading the details this problem showed up.

Jim

SIW2 said:

Macrium is a good app. - I am pleased you are happy with it.

Windows Sys image is not easy to control, as you point out.

However other 3rd party apps. like Paragon, and others, ALL allow you to restore a single partition to any location without disturbing the other partitions.

I have been using Paragon for months now and restored different things well testing... Must say I'm very happy with it and it seems time to time they let users download it free... GL :)