What backup software do you use in Windows 7

Maybe try MS synctoy 2.0? If you only want to do a copy (of changed/deleted files) that should work fine. Dont know how fast it is if you do complete disks but it works fine for copying my school data across my laptop/main pc/server. It doesnt have a build in scheduler but you can use windows for that or you can use a little .bat script and have everything run in the background when starting up/shutting down. That's what I did.

 

http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

 

I use the built-in image backup that comes with 7.

It works well and it's nice to restore a backup from within Windows.

A few caveats though.

In order to check the backup's size one needs to do some clicking and the giving of permissions. If you've tweaked Indexing to monitor the drive the backup is on and have also exposed the backup folder's size and contents then Search may hiccup for a while and not be able to do properly reveal search results. I no longer bother with checking the size of the backups.

The image backup process seems averse to making more than one backup on the same drive. It overwrites the old one if you are backing up to the same drive. I have several externals so it's not a big issue.

I'm not sure if the image backup is a true bit for bit backup. My swap file (static) is usually moved after a restore.

But it's free and has so far always done its job.

http://i415.photobucket.com/albums/pp231/littleoldmoi/capture_24102009_094935.jpg

 

As far as I recall, the image backup uses snapshots on the backup drive to do incremental image backups.

IE it takes a snapshot of the drive where the backup is stored, then overwrites the image backup file with the sectors of the source disk that are different.

So while it appears there is only one vhd image file (which is the most recent one) in the directory, there are actually incremental backups stored as diffs in the snapshots of the backup volume.

It is bit for bit, except that it knows to remove certain files and exclude the sectors that are worthless to backup. (Pagefile, hiberfile, etc.) This saves space on your backup disk.

 

Interesting, I'll check that out later. I'm wondering if this means that, when restoring, one gets the option of how far back in time to go. But I think this feature should be optional. I prefer to have several backups in case of corruption.

Fwiw, Norton Ghost when used on Vista preserved the page file and MFT locations and it offered better compression then I saw with with the Windows 7 utility.

I find that handy as I kept the MFT and pagefile right after my other files. I think Ghost merely recorded the locations and that's a truly trivial amount of data to include in a backup.

Not a big deal, I just need to disable the page file, reboot, defrag, and then re-enable the pagefile to get it back where I like it.

I've been meaning to install a second internal HD, that would let me use that for the pagefile.

I have 6 gigs of ram but I prefer to maintain a pagefile for peace of mind.

 

I'll probably use Windows Home Server to back it up just like I've been doing with all my computers. Had to replace some system drives a while back and, wow, is it ridiculously easy to recover from something like that. Keep machine connected to the network, stick in WHS boot disk, choose machine to recover, and voila you're done and up and running.

WHS is the most amazing product ever for people that don't want to mess around with spending hours setting up a system or maintaining it.

Regards,
SB

 

i also use built-in image backup as Babel.

 

SyncToy + HomeGroup here. I dabbled with Live Mesh but MS seems to have orphaned it or something.

 

Windows Home Server also...

I agree amazing product, I never worry about recovery and stuff. It works so easy.