Backup solutions - Windows

UrbanFreestyle · January 14, 2019

Hi all,

Just hoping for some advice on this one.

I currently have 3 drives in my PC.

Drive 1: 256gb m.2 for OS

Drive 2: 256gb SSD for images i am currently editing (temporary)

Drive 3: 1tb HDD for this year and last years images

External drive for older files.

So i would like some way to back my files up. Possibly buy a 2tb external drive and backup my 1tb drive using something like Acronis once a week?

Mr.Humble · January 14, 2019

Hi, consider buying a big external drive and a dual drive NAS (I'm talking 4TB and up). You'd set up the NAS in RAID 1 and set it as a backup target, then once every month or quarter you back that up to the big external drive that you keep in a different physical location (home -> office etc.)

I've had good experience with Paragon backups, now I'm starting to use Acronis (the reason is that we already had an old licence that we upgraded, not that I'd be dissatisfied with Paragon). Both have scheduling and incremental backup features.

Also if you have an Office 365 subscription consider taking advantage of that 1TB of OneDrive storage.

UrbanFreestyle · January 14, 2019

6 minutes ago, vojta.pokorny said:

Hi, consider buying a big external drive and a dual drive NAS (I'm talking 4TB and up). You'd set up the NAS in RAID 1 and set it as a backup target, then once every month or quarter you back that up to the big external drive that you keep in a different physical location (home -> office etc.)

I've had good experience with Paragon backups, now I'm starting to use Acronis (the reason is that we already had an old licence that we upgraded, not that I'd be dissatisfied with Paragon). Both have scheduling and incremental backup features.

Also if you have an Office 365 subscription consider taking advantage of that 1TB of OneDrive storage.

Yeah i try not to use cloud due to having very limited bandwith. I was kind of thinking i might have to invest in a NAS (might just build up a freenas or omv system using an old PC and spin up for backups.)

Out of interest do you prefer Paragon or Acronis?

Mr.Humble · January 14, 2019

28 minutes ago, UrbanFreestyle said:

Out of interest do you prefer Paragon or Acronis?

Both are excellent pieces of software, AFAIK both offer a free trial option (don't know the respective limitations) and honestly you can't go wrong with either of them.

That being said, Paragon Hard Disk Manager appears (at least form my understanding / man sometimes it's really hard to tell reading from a webpage) to be a more complete solution if you need stuff like advanced partitioning. It would appear that with Acronis you need their Disk Director in addition to True Image.

Acronis is also fully translated to Czech. Not necessarily THE deciding factor for me, and most likely a moot point altogether for you, but definitely useful when you're trying to guide your parents through the setup over the phone...

Also Acronis offers subscribtions in addition to permanent licences, although again that's not something I would take advantage of.

paddy-stone · January 14, 2019

If you just want to back up your system and files from the 1TB, I'd personally just get a bigger HDD to copy the data to once a day/week/month. either internal or external should be fine. Might be better off with USB maybe, at least then the data is portable and you just have to plug it in when you want to backup.

Unless you have a full spare system to make it into a NAS, and then add the HDDs in... I don't think your use case would require spending a lot on new hardware really. If you used it for media playback from too, then it MIGHT be worth a new NAS system as they are quite a bit less power hungry.

I use freefilesync for my data backups, I just prefer it FreeFileSync - Free Data Backup and File Synchronization Software

And for imaging of OS I use AOMEI backupper https://www.aomeitech.com/aomei-backupper.html