Tomorrow is World Backup Day

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Tomorrow, March 31, is World Backup day, a day that you are supposed to take stock and make sure your computers are truly backed up. “I solemnly swear
[See the full post at: Tomorrow is World Backup Day]

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Don’t forget to have multiple generations and at least one stored offsite in case of fire or natural disaster! You can’t have too many images IMHO. I’m currently rotating 6 3.5″ HDDs

[Note: the two in Red are in storage since our move!]

and I take an image every 2 weeks. I have a scheduled task that backs up my Data drive every evening at 18:15, while I’m watching the news and Jeopardy. I also take images of the C drive to another physical drive in the computer before “messing around” LOL!

Remember, if your backup drive is connected to your computer it’s useless if you get hit by a virus or ransomware attack not to mention a surge from something like lightening strike. Always disconnect your backup drive after you’ve VERIFIED the image!

HTH 😎

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, as many of you already know, I use Macrium Reflect both Free and Home. It’s always come through for me.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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doriel, GoneToPlaid, SueW, JohnW, bbearren

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There are some backup software programs that use a different user and protect the drive and thus are more resilient to ransomware. But multiple backup locations are always a wise idea.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Myst, Perq

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I use an oldie-but-goodie imaging app from Storagecraft:  Shadow Protect Desktop 5.  It has saved me and many friends over the years.  Never failed.  I make take a full image once a week and take daily incremental images in-between on both my laptop and primary desktop.  All images are immediately copied to a second external drive, then once a week or so everything gets synced  again to four more drives, (two SSDs and two spinning disks) and to a cloud as well.  The extended redundancy would be over kill to some, but it gives me an easy look back fail safe time machine for recovering individual files, whole folders or whole disk images.

In addition, I keep spare SSD M2 drives and occasionally burn a current image to one then temporarily replace the appropriate active boot drive for a test. I keeps me nimble with the recovery process.

Windows 10 Pro 20H2 all machines (4).  Intel / Nvidia all around.  Chrome, Brave, Firefox and TOR.  FreeFileSync, Revo Uninstaller Pro, Microsoft Flight Sim 2020,  Sysinternals and Nirsoft utilities, AnyDesk, Core Temp, Wiztree, VLC, Audacity, and more.  Life is good.

Desktop Asus TUF X299 Mark 1, CPU: Intel Core i7-7820X Skylake-X 8-Core 3.6 GHz, RAM: 32GB, GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. Display: Four 27" 1080p screens 2 over 2 quad.

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wavy

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Acronis True Image.
Full image on the 1st and 16th of the month. Daily incremental/differential backups in between.
Image + daily backups saved on external USB HDD and a copy on internal drive D: HDD.

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I see that the World Backup Day website is down. I wonder if they have backed up?

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GoneToPlaid, Alex5723

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World Backup Day Website still down as of 9:30am EDT – I think Susan Bradley may have caused a DoS crash 😉

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That’s hilarious. Are they trying to teach us an object lesson?

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I use Terabyte IFW which I’ve used for many years. I take a drive image each weekend which I keep on a separate SSD online for quick access, plus I keep an offline copy as well on USB HDD’s

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Being an advocate for and practitioner of Hardened Windows, I’ve got that covered.

In addition, every few months I create updated total drive images of each of my six SSD’s in my daily driver desktop to external HDD’s for offline storage.  In the event of some catastrophe, I can replace an SSD with a new one, initialize it and restore its drive image complete with all partition.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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[Dave]

I use Macrium Reflect running monthly full images on all machines with daily incrementals. These are stored on a NAS with daily redundant copies made to external USB drives. Two fulls are stored at all times allowing restoration of any specific image (or file) as it existed on any day in the last 30 to 60 days depending on the time of month. Reflect is a terrific program, relatively inexpensive and very well supported.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Dave.

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GoneToPlaid

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I’m sure my backup plan would work for no one but me but here it is.  To begin with I leave nothing on my mac.  No downloads, no documents, etc.  No emails.  Anything of value is copied and put in a physical file folder (I know I’m banking on not having a fire, etc.).  I do use time machine.  I have written down my email contacts and the bookmarks for Brave browser in a physical folder.  The beauty of my system is that if my computer gets hacked there is nothing of value on it.  As I said this probably would work for no one but me who is retired and old.  Also, I do not belong to any social media, etc.  A real luddite!!

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Acronis on old box, TBI on the new when I feel like it/remember. If I do an grade I ‘usually’ remember. Also Synctoy for email, browser, profile, data and info folders. Two different ext HDDs (now a wd going in the mix)

4 TB WD black on sale on the Egg today mmm. An off site in a safe deposit box really should be in the mix, a TB would suffice for that.

And I keep my fingers crossed…

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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An off site in a safe deposit box really should be in the mix

That was how I used to approach backups. Then my area had a major hurricane and the safe deposit box at the bank was inaccessible for just over a month. Fortunately I didn’t need it, even though our office was impacted. I had pulled my drives and 1 machine and gotten them out of the area prior to the storm. Brought them back and was back up and running.

At that point I added online encrypted backups in a different geographical location to my routine.

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cyberSAR wrote:

At that point I added online encrypted backups in a different geographical location to my routine.

Good Idea, but if the internet is down due to the natural disaster…
Now getting the drives out of the impacted area prior to the disaster, PRICELESS! 😎

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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Good Idea, but if the internet is down due to the natural disaster…
Now getting the drives out of the impacted area prior to the disaster, PRICELESS!

Except that I can setup in a hotel with a laptop and download my files I need to get back into business 🙂

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Many years ago I had a client with a bad hdd that had very critical time-sensitive data on the drive with no backups. The data was critical enough that they were more than willing to send it to a white-lab for recovery.

$1500 later and with the brand new drive in my hand, a little birdie in my head said back it up! I did a drive image then installed the lab’s hdd into the laptop. Everything worked fine… for about 1 hour and then the new drive squealed, clattered and went belly-up.

Copied the image I had made onto a new drive, installed it and it worked fine and I got it back to them in time for their case. It’s still running today.

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doriel

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Acronis true image here. Full backup every month.
And personal data (photos, videos, MP3s, game saves, etc.) are stored on two different HDDs in my drawer. I use USB-SATA reduction for those personal backups.

Dell Latitude 3420, Intel Core i7 @ 2.8 GHz, 16GB RAM, W10 22H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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I missed it 🙁 Nevermind, it’ll be back on the same date next year LOL
(along with a riveting blog about it no doubt)
Is there a day in the year that nothing is ‘tagged’ to it?

If debian is good enough for NASA...

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Yes, indeed! “Blessed are the pessimists, for they hath made backups!” 🙂

//Steve//

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I am a little late here, but I thought I would chime in anyway: I use Veeam for Linux (free). It’s the only imaging backup program I am aware of that is available to consumers (meaning not costing a small fortune as enterprise setups do) on Linux. It’s fast, reliable, and comes with features that are extra cost on a lot of Windows programs, like Macrium, like backup encryption and incremental backups.

The bad part is that it does not have a true GUI, but it does have a text-based approximation of a wizard-driven GUI, so you don’t need to type commands. The mouse won’t work, but TAB, Space, and Enter do, and while that intimidates newbies at first, it really is not hard to get used to. In the early days of MS-DOS and CP/M, an interface like that was the pinnacle of user-friendliness!

Additionally, it does not currently work with Linux kernels newer than 5.7 because of changes in the kernel itself that are beyond the control of the Veeam devs, but they are working on that, and they say they are making good progress. If you use Ubuntu 20.04 with the default kernel (5.4 LTS), it will work fine right now. There is also an easy way to get it to work with kernel 5.8, the current HWE (hardware enablement) kernel for Ubuntu 20.04, which I have described in another post.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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