Third party XP/Visa Backup software
 

i see Genie Backup Manager 8 is the recommended software from pc magazine

anyone have any comments on it, or some other program that:

1. does not do backup written to the sky(i want cd/dvd/tape in hand). want to put images on one disk, love letters in another, business of one type or another on separate disks, tech specs on another etc.

2. costs less than 100 bucks

3. does not do an image backup(i have Acronis and dislike it for incremental backups)

I was going to recommend Acronis, but then I read your last paragraph :D

Actually, I'm still going to recommend Acronis, at least v11. It allows you to create multiple backup jobs as image or file-based. You can also mount images and restore selectively from them, so I really don't see a downside.

I had to replace a failing hard drive on my ThinkPad T60 (watch out for those Seagate Momentus 7200.1 100GB drives, I predict they'll be dropping like flies on ThinkPads due to excessive head-park cycling). Acronis backed me up to both network storage and DVD as a belt-and-suspenders approach, and allowed me to restore to the new drive without first installing Windows or even formatting it; I simply booted off the Acronis CD, selected the backup off the network share, and left it alone for 4 hours (no GigE in the PorkRind household yet :)).

I think I've posted this on here a few times. What's wrong with Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup?

It's written by Veritas, licensed by MS, included on every Windows OS since 98, and works with tapes. It does not have the ability to write directly to multiple CDs/DVS, 'to span them', that I'm aware of.

But the big argument in it's favor, is that it works with every known version of Windows since Win 98. Including all the server versions. Lots of people talk about third party backup suites, but how many of them are prepared to purchase every upgrade that ever comes out from now to eternity? Assuming the software is still made/supported/company is still in business? I'd make a bet that people who purchase one copy of a third-party backup suite are once-and-done and never move beyond that one purchase.

What happens if you need to open a backup saveset you created with {fill in the name} five years ago and you can't? Or you misplaced the license key (it's on your failed HD), or you don't have the install disks, or the version doesn't run on the current OS version you're using?

My experience with both Acronis and SyncBack has been pretty good.

I switched from Ghost to Acronis because of the recommendations here.

With Ghost, I was able to do a monthly full backup and weekly incremental backups in the same directory. Ghost was smart enough to name the backup files properly so that it all could co-exist in the same directory.

With Acronis, I had to create a pre-backup script to move off the old full backup and weekly incrementals into a subdir (named by date) before the new full backup is taken, or the new full backup would fail. At least it had that option to allow you to do that.

Why don't you like the incremental backups in Acronis?

Here's some other minor issues I've had with Acronis.

- Don't install Seagates Disc Wizard if you have Acronis. First, it's a subset of the Acronis product, so you don't need it. Secondly, I ended up having to re-install Acronis because it lost it's serial number after I installed Seagate's Disc Wizard. Acronis makes it fairly easy to recover your serial number through their web site if you haven't recorded it somewhere. My guess is that installing Disc Wizard must have wiped out some registry info, but I didn't look into it enough to figure out what they had done. I just removed everything and re-installed it.

- If you try to clone a disk with no partition table on it, Acronis will fail with no decent error message after it reboots as part of the cloning process. Workaround was to create a label and a filesystem on the target disk, and let Acronis overwrite it as part of the process. The error was something like "disk not found". You would think that they might recognize that as a problem before the reboot, but they didn't. In my case, the source disk was the internal drive on my notebook and the target disk was in a USB enclosure. Same exact disk models. (This problem is why I tried Seagate's Disc Wizard, before I knew it was a subset of the Acronis product.)

- Also related to this same issue, at some point my backup drive got renumbered from G to E, and I didn't realize that my incremental backups were failing until I actually happened to check the backup dir on the backup drive. I guess it's a good idea to permanently assign a drive letter to your backup drive, which is what I ended up doing. (More an issue that I created, but I was surprised I didn't get some sort of alert when the weekly incremental backup failed. There was certainly an error message displayed when I manually opened the application, but when you expect everything to just work in the background, you don't need to open the application unless you want to change something.)

Overall, I think it's a decent product, but it does have a few quirks. Nothing huge though, as I was able to work around all of them. I think Ghost was also a decent product, but it seems like a lot of people dislike most Norton/Symantec products these days. (Probably because their consumer A/V products have deteriorated to the point of being bloatware, I suppose.)

-David

I can't seem to find this? Where in the directory is the application located?

i find it in vista. i click the ball with the MS flag in it to start.

you may have had an option to not load this software, so it is not there. this is the MS backup

i do not like MS backup as they frequently do not transfer from on MSOS to the next. this was a problem when 95,98,2000, and xp came out pretty close together. if you were just transferring from one to another, no problem, but if you wanted to get some archived data from say 4 years back, you would have to find a machine with the older OS on it.

It's not pre-installed by default on all of the OS flavors:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showp...12&postcount=7

This has not been my experience, but then I have not tried going from one OS to another for a long time.

If this is a concern, I'd point out that many of the other backup utilities mentioned here are probably worse off in this feature. To make them operable over the span of several years and across several different OS versions, you'd have to commit to obtaining every new release/version that comes along. And you'd have to take the leap of faith that the backup file formats do not change from one release to another. In my experience, most of the lesser known versions, such as OEM versions that come with external HDs, often packaged as "bonus software", have a one-release lifecycle, and after that the vendor and the software are nowhere to be found.

The backup software I recommend for my users:
NovaBACKUP
EMC Retrospect Professional (over $100, a little overwhelming for some)

If you are doing only the data files you specified, you could just make a batch file to xcopy them all to DVD or CD (though probably not tape).

It's free, it can be used on any machine out there, it will span disks but won't break a file across disks. As long as you don't have any files larger then a dvd, and it's just those files, xcopy will do what you want.

????????????????????

what has been your experience not going from one os to another????????

seagate to stomp worked from 95 to xp.

From Fat Wallet - Acronis ver 11 is only $10 right now for ver 11

Acronis.com has 80% off sale on True Image Home v11

Use coupon code: ATIH80 (Coupon is good through the 19th)

TrueImage v11

Bringing up an older thread -

My need is to back up a 100mb laptop hard drive.

I just purchased an external drive (WD Passport), but the included software doesn't seem to offer a quick and easy way to make a full image backup - only to set up folders to be synchronized.

Because this is a personal, not business, machine, my only real interest is to be able to do full image backups, in order to be able to restore onto a replacement HDD in case the laptop HDD has a catastrophic failure. I would envision keeping three full images (overwriting the oldest when a new image is taken, etc).

Is Acronis the best tool for this kind of basic protection, or ar there alternatives?

Acronis will do what you want. It will even give you a better way to do what you want.

For example, you take a full backup once, then set it up to do an incremental backup, and keep a maximum of 3 incremental backups. It will consolidate the old incremental backups into the full backup automatically. Even though the incremental backups are stored in separate files, Acronis organizes and displays them as a single backup. When you open the backup, you pick the date you want at the top level.

Or you can set it up your way also, and cap the number of full backups that it keeps.

There's pros and cons to both methods.

You can do a full restore from any of the backup types that Acronis supports.

-David