Backup in Windows 11

[Donald]

Looking to backup to backup my C drive and more importantly an external hard drive to another external RAID box.

Most of what I see searching on the web is backing up to OneDrive or backing up the system and it's folders and files to an external hard drive. I have most of my personal data on one external hard drive and want to back it up to another external hard drive that happens to be a RAID box.

The RAID is eSATA vintage. I have an adapter cable from eSATA to USB.

 

[Ed_Flecko]

I use Clonezilla (https://clonezilla.org/) to back up my hard drive every week. I have used Clonezilla to restore my backup from time to time when needed and it works flawlessly.

I use Sardu (https://www.sardu.pro/) to make a bootable USB drive out of the Clonezilla .iso. As long as your external RAID is plugged in when you boot from the Sardu USB, you should be able to choose it as the "target" of where to store your backups.

Ed

 

[AandPDan]

Clonezilla for sure. I just use Rufus to burn a bootable usb drive.

 

[uc50ic4more]

Caveat: I am not a Windows user; but I recall setting up backups for people and having to look for Windows' "File History" function. It appears to store incremental backups and would allow you to restore data from different points in time. This would be for user-space data; OS snapshots can also be taken but I don't recall offhand how. I vaguely recall it was not through the consumer-oriented "Settings" app but instead the Control Panel. I'd take snapshots on larger OS updates and File History backups every day, hour, week, whatever suits you best.

The only thing you'd have to do is ensure that the external drive you want backed up is on the lists of things to back up: By default, this utility may only look at Documents, Pictures, etc.

Clonezilla is fine as a replication tool but seems like dramatic overkill for backups; and cannot do anything remotely close to deduplication or incremental backups.

 

[dubber09]

For simple data backup - SyncToy.

 

[Killer223]

just use windows backup, select the destination drive and the source drives/folders. it's built into the system....

 

[Donald]

I guess I would like a product that backs up the various drives on a scheduled basis. Like back everything up once a day that has been changed.

 

[Pablo]

Use Samsung SSD's. Their utility is really easy.

 

[uc50ic4more]

I guess I would like a product that backs up the various drives on a scheduled basis. Like back everything up once a day that has been changed.

Windows' built-in File History does exactly that.

 

[barryh]

File history does more than a simple back up, it produces a file history so that you can recover older versions of a file. In other words it saves multiple copies of each file. The downside is it can consume a huge amount of storage space on whatever external drive you use for the backup.

I tried using file history but for several reasons I went back to using cloud storage such as Dropbox or OneDrive which have the advantage of being accessible from more than one computer. You can access them anywhere once logged in. Like file history cloud based solutions also have a limited ability to recover older versions of a file.

I never rely on a single backup for critical files that I can't afford to lose so one external drive is not enough even if it's raid. What happens if the house burns down or someone steals the laptop and the backup drive. Any scenario where it's possible to lose both the original file and the backup at the same time is not good enough. A cloud based backup can form part of a more secure arrangement.

 

[uc50ic4more]

Any scenario where it's possible to lose both the original file and the backup at the same time is not good enough. A cloud based backup can form part of a more secure arrangement.

The 3-2-1 "best practice" describes this: 3 copies, 2 on-site, 1 off-site. The 2 on-site would include your working copy and the local backup.

 

[Donald]

For simple data backup - SyncToy.

Seems buggy.

 

[Pew]

Free or paid?

 

[Nick1994]

I guess I would like a product that backs up the various drives on a scheduled basis. Like back everything up once a day that has been changed.

OneDrive will do that

 

[Donald]

OneDrive will do that

I have hundreds or a few thousand pictures. Way more than OneDrive will do for free.

 

[Nick1994]

I have hundreds or a few thousand pictures. Way more than OneDrive will do for free.

Gotta pay to play, I didn't see anything in your post wanting it for free.

 

[Donald]

Gotta pay to play, I didn't see anything in your post wanting it for free.

Of course free would be best.

If I have to pay for storage it will be on Proton. Not OneDrive.

 

[barryh]

You get 5 Gb free with OneDrive and I don't have more than 5 Gb worth of critical files that I access on a daily basis. My non critical files still get backed up but on a couple of local copies or on another free cloud app such as Dropbox. I used Dropbox for years and still have an account. I just no longer have it sync daily because the files on it don't change from one year to the next. The only thing to watch is that Dropbox will close your account if it see no activity for 1 year.

Getting free storage may need to go hand in hand with some housekeeping which is no bad thing.

 

[Donald]

I think most of my important files are photos on vacation or of family. They are only little once. There are vacation pictures where I took several similar ones and need to look at the group and keep just one or two. Probably hundreds of those types of groups of similar pictures.

Then there are pictures where I took a picture of something to sell on CraigsList, it's sold so no longer need picture. And a large assortment of pictures of engines or serial number tags or similar pictures that I wanted at the moment but no longer need. I only have daughters are neither seem interested in looking at pictures of my boat engine!!

At the end of the day I should have backups beyond my Raid device that are not in my house, so probably cloud storage.

 

[dumkid]

Google gives you 15gb of space, but you have to share it between your emails, documents, etc.