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I'm glad this thread is here, since I have a Windows related backup question, and I'm hoping someone here can help me out. I have a machine running Windows 8.1, and I'm looking for some software to make daily incremental backups of the entire system to an external drive. This means that it backs up the entire Windows installation, all of my programs, and all other data so that when I restore a backup, the computer will boot to the exact state it was in when the backup was made. Preferably it would be able to keep multiple backups on hand from previous days until my backup drive is filled, so if I want to restore to a state from several days or weeks ago, I could do that. And it would be incremental so that it doesn't have to backup everything every time a new backup is made. Basically, I'm looking for something that's the Windows equivalent of OS X's Time Machine feature, except I don't need hourly backups, nor do I need the superfluous visual effects. I already tried out EaseUS Todo Backup, since it claimed to do the exact thing I wanted. However, I recently corrupted my system, restored my entire hard drive from its backup, only to find that Windows wouldn't boot. It goes directly into recovery mode, and fails to fix whatever the problem is. I'm still trying to figure out how to fix it and I might need to reinstall Windows completely. Sufficed to say, I'm deeply disappointed in this software because it failed me when I needed it the most. Does anyone have any suggestions? From all of the googling I'm doing it's looking like there aren't any clear winners for what I want to do. There's a lot of software that backs up data, but isn't necessarily able to restore everything including Windows to a previous state and keep everything booting properly. And there's lots of software for cloning my drive, which I could do if there's no other viable option, but with drive cloning it's not feasible to do that daily, nor can it restore to a state from days past -- there'd only be one backup. And from what I can tell, the backup options supplied by Microsoft are pretty much useless unless you just want to back up the photos you sent to your grandmother or something.
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Mar 31, 2015 19:29
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 01:43 |
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Flipperwaldt posted:Not true. Acronis and the paid versions of Macrium Reflect can do differential or incremental cloning. The Gunslinger posted:I really wouldn't recommend Acronis Trueimage, that product seems to get shittier with every iteration. It's another one where I've had it fail in the worst way when I needed it the most and support from them was loving useless. The good news for me is that I was able to successfully restore the backup that I made using EaseUS Todo Backup. It turns out the last several backups it made were corrupted, and I just needed to restore one from a little earlier. However, that program has silently failed on me twice now. Once it actually caught the error, but made no effort to inform me that something was wrong. It just kept failing in the background and I didn't notice until I manually checked it -- for shame! And these latest backups were corrupted but there was no indication until I tried to restore them. So that doesn't bode well. I don't need a perfect backup solution, and it's okay if the interface is clunky. I just want something for Windows that's reliable. Is that too much to ask?
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Apr 1, 2015 06:04
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Also, I feel this is good time to mention that Time Machine is, sadly, not the easy and reliable backup solution it purports to be. So people running OS X, heed my warning: Time Machine has a bug that has existed since OS X 10.9 and seems to have gotten worse in OS X 10.10 where it will skip seemingly arbitrary files and folders. They just won't be copied into your backup anymore. I got burned by this recently when I restored using my Time Machine backup only to find that over 10 GB of data were suddenly freed up on my computer, and what wasn't backed up included all of the data for a project I was working on for a very important client. If I didn't have the good sense to have that backed up in one more place, I would have been absolutely hosed. Lots of the files of mine that were missing seemed to disappear from my Time Machine drive around the time I upgraded to 10.10, but I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or not. It's unclear how widespread this bug is, but it's happened enough times to spur multiple threads in Apple's discussion forums. So far, from all of my searching, there is no permanent fix. But the sad upshot of this is that you can't rely on Time Machine anymore. So for those of you using Time Machine, I recommend opening Terminal and running the following command: code:
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Apr 1, 2015 06:13
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I'm also a CrashPlan Home user and while my subscription doesn't expire for several more months, I'm wondering what good alternatives exist that have comparable features. The features from CrashPlan that I like a lot are:
The two most common choices are Backblaze and Carbonite. I don't think Carbonite is a good option for me. I'd need to go for the more expensive plan in order to include multiple hard drives. Also, I'm on a mac so I couldn't use a private encryption key. And I don't like how they force you to manually select backing up files over 4 GB. I really want it to automatically back up everything. Backblaze might be my best bet. Apparently their desktop app is well written and not a resource hog, but their restoration process sucks... I'd much rather just download the files I want than download a zip file. And I don't like how when you use a private encryption key, you still need to send it to them to restore anything because the decryption is done on their servers. They claim the key is never saved, but it still makes me uncomfortable. Maybe I'm just being paranoid for no good reason though. Those are the main options I'm aware of, and some cursory research hasn't led me to find anything else. Are there any other ones that might fit my needs?
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Sep 18, 2017 01:29
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Furism posted:There's nothing today on the market similar to what CrashPlan Home used to offer. Probably because it was too cheap and some people were abusing that, I don't know. But there's no direct equivalent. People here tend to go with duplicity/restic against a BackBlaze B2 online storage, but that's more involved than a "it just works" software. quote:I think the closest you'll get is CloudBerry Backup (https://www.cloudberrylab.com/), it's a one-off purchase, and then add a subscription to whatever cloud provider on top of that (for reference, my 400 GB of backup costs me less than $2/month. quote:Carbonite is poo poo.You can't specify which files you want to backup. They have their own list of acceptable formats (apparently mp3 and flac are not on it) and won't upload anything else outside of that list, even if you tell it to.
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Sep 18, 2017 21:44
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You guys may have convinced me to go to with Duplicati + Backblaze B2. Duplicati looks like a great piece of software if it works as well as I'm getting the impression it does, and Backblaze B2 seems very affordable. Can anyone speak to the resource usage of Duplicati? That was my biggest complaint with Crashplan, and I'm wondering how it compares to Backblaze's desktop client (when no anti-virus is running) or CloudBerry. edit: Actually that's probably not even that big of a deal either way, since Duplicati is scheduled, and it's perfectly acceptable for my uses to have it run just once a day at like 4 AM or something like that. GuyGizmo fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Sep 19, 2017 |
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Sep 19, 2017 16:12
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Dillbag posted:Can I use Duplicati with Sync.com? As a Canadian, I like the idea of my data being stored on a local server and theoretically protected by Canadian privacy laws, but I can't figure out if Sync.com will work as a backend. As far as I can tell it can only point to a local folder as the sync folder. Can anyone confirm if that is true? Is it also the case that things like file names and paths are also encrypted?
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Sep 22, 2017 19:54
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What are people's recommendations for Windows backup software that's just for making local backups? I'm looking for one that can do something similar to Time Machine in macOS, namely:
Is my feeling about it on point? If so, what's a good alternative?
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Oct 12, 2017 05:56
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So I've decided to ditch EaseUS Todo Backup Free / Home edition. I'm going to start my backup over fresh with a different piece of software. Right now I'm eyeballing Acronis edit: wrong Acronis product GuyGizmo fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Oct 18, 2017 |
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Oct 18, 2017 06:21
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I just did a little research and found that by and large Macrium Reflect is getting a lot of favorable reviews. It seems more in line with my needs than Veeam. And also I found a lot of negative reviews from the last couple of years about Acronis TrueImage, so it may not be as good as it once was. So I think I'll try Macrium Reflect.
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Oct 18, 2017 21:17
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I'm coming up on the end of my Crashplan Personal subscription and am re-evaluating what online backup solution I want to switch to. I'm torn between Duplicati + Backblaze B2 and Backblaze Personal Backup. While originally I liked the idea of using Duplicati (especially since it has better security and a better restoration process), I priced out what it would cost me per year just to back up my main workstation on to B2 and it's more than five times the price of just using Backblaze, as that workstation has nearly 4.5 TB of data on it. And if I wanted to back up my other two systems -- a gaming PC and a media server that combined have 14 TB of data -- then fogettaboutit. I'm starting to think their unlimited data feature is really hard to beat, even if it means the service itself is somewhat inferior.
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Jan 23, 2018 23:07
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VikingofRock posted:I know that when restoring from B2, you can have them send you a hard drive with all your data on it in the mail. I thought that only applied to Backblaze (the backup service), not B2. Does B2 actually offer that? And if you do it, is it still possible to decrypt and decode the data using Duplicati?
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Jan 25, 2018 18:12
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 01:43 |
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I would go with Duplicati + B2... but I have something like 6 TB to backup. Can't beat that unlimited data you get with Backblaze.
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Mar 8, 2018 05:26
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