asked on

if I have performed backups of critical data, as are any advantage to doing a full disc backup?

My PC is an HP e9150t quad core desktop using an Intel i7 CPU (920@2.67 GHz). I have 8 GB of RAM and am running Windows 7 Home Premium-64-Bit. It was purchased new from HP, in July 2009. The Microsoft products I am running include the 2007 versions of Outlook, Word, and Excel.

For years I've been doing backups and I have a double redundancy of data on more than 3 backup drives. Is there any advantage to performing a full image backup of a complete drive, or is the method I'm using sufficient to insure against data loss due to hard drive failure or other catastrophic events? Thank you.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

rindi

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

photoman11

ASKER

So it sounds like what you are saying (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that if I were to do an incremental backup on an incremental basis, that would be far superior then running bull type of backups. is this is an accurate interpretation of what you've said?

Assuming that is true, would you have any recommendations for packages that do image backups which are relatively inexpensive or free?

Thanks,

Robert

rindi

It's not superior, but faster and needs less storage space on the backup media. The disadvantage of incremental backups is that when you restore you'll have to go through all the incremental backups, while with a full backup you just restore the last full backup before the crash.

I'd recommend shadowprotect from storagecraft, it has some very good options others don't have. An advantage of it is that it can consolidate incremental backups so they get easier to manage and make restores easier without having to go through all yourself. But it isn't free:

http://www.storagecraft.com/

Also good, but not with as many features would be Paragon's backup tools. There is a very basic free version, but I'd recommend the non free versions so get incremental backups etc:

http://www.paragon-software.com/index.html

SOLUTION

ReclaiMe

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

Danny Child

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

nobus

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

rindi

You wouldn't be able to restore an OEM version of windows anyway if you change the hardware, and you can still extract specific files from an image backup, there is no need to restore the complete image if you don't have to recover the OS

SOLUTION