M1k3y

Vyse, I just realized that I actually don't know what exactly you want. What are you using the machine for? What are your main concerns? How often/much is your system changing? Can the system be off (as in "not usable") while running the backup or do you need backups while the machine is being used? Are you comfortable using a more advanced backup system or do you need a "single button noob solution"? Is your focus on saving your system settings, or the system as a whole? Do the backups need to be able to interrupt and continue on demand or are you ok with letting your system run until it's finished?

Thank you very much, that was exactly what I was searching for.

Yes, you will loose data. The point of a backup is not to make sure you always have a 100% accurate copy, but to have a copy good enough that you can restore your state with as little work as possible. If the backups are applied regular, you will only loose what has been done since the last copy. On short intervals its no problem to redo what has been lost. In theory a RAID sounds like the perfect backup. The problem is that it only protects you from a single failure scenario. What you actually want is a real time replication to a offsite datacenter with automatic disk snapshots. But that is just insanely expensive to set up and bottlenecks on your Internet connection.

You just can backup the whole drive (everything in C: ). With this all settings and software will be saved. The only thing not being saved will be your Partition Layout and your Bootloader. In case of a complete drive failure you will have to use a recovery/install disk to repair the bootloader. The only way to get around this is to make an offline backup using a live system like partedmagic. For a simple "online" backup you can just use any tool which can do mass copy jobs. I will look into some alternatives later and write them down.

Using KVM at my local hackerspace, which I have to say astonishing good performance and hasn't failed me once. Also I like the concept of nested virtualization, although then you will loose a LOT of performance on the additional layer.

Sorry, but RAID is NOT a backup. It won't protect from overvolt damages, accidental deletion, system errors, data corruption or "Windows being dumb". The only thing it protects you from is an isolated fail of a single drive. Vyse, if you want to make sure your data is safe, you want to have a look at the 3-2-1 strategy: 3 copies of the data on 2 different types of medium with 1 copy being stored offsite. For this you could use 2 external hard disks you clone your SSD to (which satifies 3 and 2). Store one of the Disks at another location and swap them regulary. In the worst case (lightningstrike during backup / house burns down) you lose all data since the last swap. Also use 2 external disks from different manufactores, to make sure you don't have 2 disks from a bad batch. And if you want to go really fancy to make sure you don't accidently delete data and only discover it after overwriting your backup drives, you can look at differential or incremental backups. I heard "borg backup" is quite good at this kind of backups, although I don't know how easy it is to use on Windows. EDIT: Also try the recovery process, the earlier the better (as long as there are no data to loose). If you never tried wether restoring a backup works, you don't have a backup.

You might want to have a look at robocopy. I don't know if it can run as a sceduled task and you will have to do a bit of setup and maybe a small amount of scripting, but it can do what you want for free. (It's basically a implementation of rsync, one of the most powerful copy and sync tools from the linux world.)

Sure will do. But since I want a nice case instead of a small one, the space shouldn't be aproblem.

Those are no connectors, they are temperature sensors.

Hello all, just registered here since I have a problem I just couldn't fix. Long story short, I'm designing a new case for my own PC (my first build). I want the case to be fully compatible with the ATX standard. But I just can't find the specifications for the expansion cards (graphics card, additional network interface, etc). Yes, I could just take my cards and meassure them, but than I can't be sure that ALL possible cards will fit. Also it will be a much cleaner build when I have absolute numbers. (Considering what odd numbers are used throughout the ATX standard, rounding would be a bad idea). And before someone asks, yes I have searched the ATX specifications for information about the expansion cards. When I have all the data I need I also plan to merge them into one big document to make it easier to build ATX-cases yourself. Thank you all in advance. -- Also please excuse my poor english, I'm not a native.