Best back-up program

[Wolly9102]

Hi,

 

What do you guys recommend as an back-up program. Price doens't really matter. This is not for me btw.

 

 

Thanks,

[rcmaehl]

robocopy set as a scheduled task

[Mr.Humble]

I've recently had very good experiences with Acronis True Image.

 

You can set if you want full or incremental (or a combination), schedule regular backups, backup to a network device or cloud, automatically set up reserve copies to a different location, it has email notification options and you can easily get into the backup file if you just need to grab an old version of a particular file.

 

Paragon Hard Disk Manager is also very good, especially as it has the ability to convert it's backups to a .vhdx and mount it in Hyper-V.

 

My current setup is:

 

Documents and pictures on OneDrive, so it's synced on all my devices and has file history.

Anything important but device specific has File History enabled with OneDrive as a target.

Acronis for system partition backups, stored on a HDD and my external HDD, and planning to set up scheduled incremental backups with reserved copies to OneDrive.

Second copy of all files (movies etc.) on external HDD

[Lady Fitzgerald]

For best results, I recommend two different programs: Macrium Reflect Free and FreeFileSync.

 

First, System files (OS, programs, etc.) should be segregated from data files. This can be done by putting all the System files on one drive and the data files on other drives or,if using a sngle drive, put the System files on one partition and the data files on another partition (this is pretty much the only time I recommend partitioning).

 

System files are best backed up by imaging (Macrium Reflect Free is the imaging program I recommend though there are other good ones). An image is like a photo negative. Like a photo negative is used to make a print, an image is used to restore the contents of the drive or partition to the state it was in when the image was taken. One can keep mutiple images so one can choose how far back to restore their System.

 

While imaging (and cloning, which I do not recommend for backups) is necessary to restore System files, it is to slow and space wasting for backing up data. Folder/file syncing programs are best for that purpose, being faster and using far less drive space (I recommend FreeFileSync in Mirror Mode--not the same as RAID 1--but there are other good programs for this). Folder/file syncing will result in what is essentially an exact clone of the drive being backed up. After the initial backup, only files that have been added, changed, or deleted are involved when updating a backup so the process is much faster than imaging.

 

Good folder/file syncing programs (including FreeFileSync) have an option called Versioning. When enabled (which I strongly recommend), it will direct deleted files to a versioning folder or file of your choice. This will protect you from accidentally deleted files and files that get corrupted.

[Wolly9102]

Thanks everbody for anwsering. I will look into them all.