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XP or Vista user — take the poll!
Armando:
TrueImage does incremental and differential backups for images as well as at file level. If you want to be able to restore your system complete with installed apps the imaging is the only way to do it. I agree that you should get a "just installed image" of your system but for daily/weekly/monthly backups (however often you choose to do it ... and that reminds me ...) increments for the image are ideal. You can use it like a System Restore (albeit a bit slower but works properly) and has certainly been a life saver for me at times.
Ideally you need a cycle of something like:
Baseline Backup 1 ... Inc 1 ... Inc 2 ... Inc 3 ... .... ... Inc n (however long you want to keep this up)
Baseline Backup 2 ... Inc 1 ...etc.
Baseline Backup 3 (at which point all the increments for backup 1 become a bit irrelevant).
Generally I try to keep the current and last two baseline backups - but only one set of previous backup increments. That way I can wind back to recent daily backups but also jumpt straight back a few weeks to if a problem arises that seems to have started a while ago but was hidden.
File level backup is really only useful for data files - but I agree incremental backups should be unaffected in that case by defragmentation.
-Carol Haynes (September 18, 2007, 04:22 AM)
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[off topic]This pretty much how I do it.
In my backup strategy, Images are not only for "baseline 100% clean system after you've just set it up with all your stuff". I image my C drive once every 2 weeks/month (depending on how much I've change my system), and use increments whenever its more convenient. Like Carol, these Images constitute my “SystemRestore” (a bit more flexible — can store images where ever I want — but slower than something like Firstdefense). I always have at least 6 months worth of images + archives of the first "baseline 100% clean system....". I use SyncbackSE for everyday Data backup. (See https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=1999.msg58886#msg58886 for the details of my backup strategy — it changed a bit since then, but not by much.). I also Image my document partition once every 4 months for archiving purposes (on DVDs). [/off-topic]
[deXter]:
It depends on SP1. If SP1 turns out to be the medicine Vista needs, I'll puchase a new PC and switch over. It also depends if I can continue to survive on this 10 year old PC. As long as my fav. software don't become bloatware ;D
f0dder:
10 year old PC + crapsta? Good luck, it's a slow pig (compared to XP) even on recent machines :)
mwang:
It's not quite true - if you defrag at the files level then lots of files don't change from one defrag to the next (and neither does their position on the partition) consequently TrueImage will still produce reasonable incremental or differential backups. It is only when you use defragmenters that reorganise your whole hard disc that you cause imaging software problems because the new backups will be the same size as the base backup.-Carol Haynes (September 17, 2007, 03:40 PM)
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Sorry, I wasn't following this thread and saw this just now. I'm not sure I understand here. What's defrag'ing at the files level?
Carol Haynes:
Defragmenting individual files or just groups of files rather than whole discs. That is moving a single file or group of files on your hard disc so that the data is stored in a single contiguous block.
There are free tools out there to do that (see SysInternals) but with a defragmenter such as PerfectDisc which organises your files on the basis of how often they change even defragmenting a whole disc effectively becomes only defragmenting a few files over a period of time as the files that don't change are blocked together. This effectively means that incremental backups will be larger than if you didn't defrag but the increase in size won't be huge or counter productive.
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