Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

What to use to back up 1:1 ?

(1/7) > >>

Curt:
For a very long period of time, I would settle with Windows' backup/recovery solution. I have been 'lucky' and have not yet needed any thing else. From time to time I have purchased a back up program when the price was right (Acronis Truemage Home 12, Avanquest PerfectImage 12, Backup4All Pro 4, Paragon Harddisk Manager 2010, R-Drive Image Backup). Unfortunately none of these seems to offer the solution I want; they all want to compress and back up in a proprietary format, or to create an image which I see as just another proprietary format. I don't see compressed containers as a safe mean - and safety is what back ups are about - and I don't want to be enslaved by some proprietary format.

I used Acronis TrueImage Home 12 to clone my C drive, only to realize that Acronis doesn't offer incremental back ups for to such. A full cloning takes 8 hours.

I want an image but I don't want an "image" file format; it too is proprietary, I imagine (sorry!). I want a 1:1 copy; a clone (not of the drive sectors, but of the files)! Preferably it should offer automatic, silent, incremental updates of the back up.  What should I use?  
:tellme:

Edited:
I can only back up to external USB hard-drive (2x500 GB).

kfitting:
MirrorFolder has worked great for me:
MirrorFolder

Curt:
MirrorFolder comes very close!  :up:


However:

Note that MirrorFolder does not support mirroring entire system drive on external removable and network drives at present.
--- End quote ---

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=2625.msg205868#msg205868-500
--- End quote ---

kfitting:
Hmmm... yeah I never tried to do that... wonder if you could just back up all folders in the root.  Dont know.

tomos:
I used Acronis TrueImage Home 12 to clone my C drive, only to realize that Acronis doesn't offer incremental back ups for to such. A full cloning takes 8 hours.
-Curt (May 18, 2010, 07:40 AM)
--- End quote ---

Hi Curt, I'm not clear there - do you mean Acronis doesnt do incremental - or doesnt offer them to the C drive?
I have Acronis 10 & it can do incremental backups...

A full imaging of 15GB or so takes maybe 10 - 20 mins here. (You  can exclude files (& filetypes) but I dont know can you exclude folders)
Either you have everything (& a lot of it!) on C, or, it's not working as it should if it's taking 8 hours (maybe you have compression set to highest level or something)
I have restored selected files from an image and found it no problem (the restored files can also be copied elsewhere than their original location).

OTOH I can understand your preference for non-proprietary formats but you're gonna need a lot of space for all those uncompressed backups if you do find a solution..

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page