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How do you backup your files?

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superboyac:
I've wondered about this "poweruser" question for a while now, and I know this is the perfect place to get an answer.  I'm wondering how you guys backup your information stored on your computer.  I'm not talking about making an image of your system or anything like, I'm talking about backing up stand alone files, like mp3's, your documents, receipts, pictures, etc.

Up until now, what I always do is have two directories, "new" and "burned".  As you can tell, stuff that gets burned then gets moved from "new" to "burned" so I know that it's been taken care of.  I do this for each category, so for my pictures directory, I have a new and burned directory, and same for "my documents", etc.

But I was looking at software like Genie Backup, and I see that it can "span" or something, where it sounds like I can make incremental backups as necessary.  Like, as my directory grows by about 4 GB, I know it's time to burn another DVD...so can I just use Genie, and it will automatically detect which files are new/changed, and only burn those on the new DVD?  Is that how it works?

The other problem with that is that I won't be able to tell what is backed up and what isn't just by browsing my files.  If I use the incremental backup way, I feel like I have to ditch my previous "new/backup" method, because otherwise, the program would burn everything because technically they are changing locations.

Anyway, so I was wondering how you guys go about backing up your files.  I just have this feeling that I am going about rather inefficiently.

Carol Haynes:
Here is the Help File description of backup types from Genie:

Normal Backup Backup all selected files and folders every time.

Increment Includes all files that have changed since the last normal (full) or incremental backup using the files' last modified date and time stamp.

Mirror Includes all files that have changed since the last normal (full) or incremental backup using the files' last modified date and time stamp. This backup type does not support rollback, so old versions of files will be replacesd with newer ones and missing files will be deleted from the backup set.

Differential Includes all files since last normal (full) backup using the files' last modified date and time stamp.
--- End quote ---


In Genie you set up backup tasks (collections of files and folders to backup and specific task, like backup Outlook Express) and then incremental/differential will monitor for changes to files/folder contents etc. and next time you run the task only backup the changed items.

Differential backups are the more space efficient, as it only keeps the first FULL backup and then makes a single differential backup of changes which means previous differential 'lumps' can be deleted as required without affecting backup integrity -so effectively you have only two two parts to your backup. It can also automate the deletion of previous diffential 'lumps' by specifying how many backups to retain.

Incremental backups allow for easier rollback to a previous state because it always saves all changes since the last backup - so you have a FULL backup plus a number of incremental backups which can be restored independently ad files can be extracted from different dated backups. This can allow some control over version fo files to recover which can be very useful. Note that ALL increments must be retained for a successful restore.

brotherS:
Differential backups are the more space efficient, as it only keeps the first FULL backup and then makes a single differential backup of changes which means previous differential 'lumps' can be deleted as required without affecting backup integrity -so effectively you have only two two parts to your backup. It can also automate the deletion of previous diffential 'lumps' by specifying how many backups to retain.
-Carol Haynes (January 03, 2006, 03:29 AM)
--- End quote ---
Is this meant to backup to another HD or is this a good choice too if you backup to DVD-RW?

Incremental backups allow for easier rollback to a previous state because it always saves all changes since the last backup - so you have a FULL backup plus a number of incremental backups which can be restored independently ad files can be extracted from different dated backups. This can allow some control over version fo files to recover which can be very useful. Note that ALL increments must be retained for a successful restore.

--- End quote ---
But if one of the backup DVDs is destroyed I'm able to restore all of the files on the other backup DVDs, right?

Carol Haynes:
I use backup to hard disk - I haven't tried with DVD. I presume if you backup to DVD a record is kept somewhere of the date/time of backup so that the diefferetial/incremental backups can be performed - but since I haven't tried it I don't know if this works.

For incremental backups you need all of the DVD prior to the backup date you wish to restore. For example, if you have the following sets of backups:

BASE

Inc1

Inc2

Inc3

The BASE backup provides a backup at the time the first backup is performed. Each increment provides later updates to that backup. If you want to retore the latest version of the backup then all 4 backups must be available. If Inc2 becomes corrupted you can only restore Inc1+BASE, if BASE becomes corrupted you won't be able to restore anything.

Having never been in this position I don't know if Genie is intelligent enough to retrieve what it can or if, like most software, it will simply say the backup is corrupt.

brotherS:
Ok, thanks! Would be great if we had someone here using "Differential backups" with DVD. Lets see :)

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