Win 7 Back-up & Restore

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Hey Everyone,

I’m big on backing up my computer & am using Windows 7 Ultimate and have a few question:

1. I created a Win 7 X64 Recovery Disk just in case I can’t boot. I booted with it, is that enough?
2. I set up a back-up to run every night at 3AM & it includes a system image and is stored on my external USB hard drive. Is a nightly back-up too much?
3. My External USB hard drive keeps filling up, is there a way to set limits, when I set up the back-ups, I said let windows decide, I see I have back-up to Dec 14th when I started this process.
4. On my XP system I used Acronis TI and I could set 7 days worth of back-ups for recovery, can I do that now with Win 7, HOW?

Thanks for any Help,

Steve

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An image a day is too much. I make one upon initial setup, when eveything is just right…and then maybe just before a major change that would adversly affect recovery time if something went wrong, and then just after, if everything was ok…for me that’s not very often because my definition of major change is very broad.
Data on the other hand is a good idea to back up daily, but are you the type who might want an old version of the same file? Then keep on keeping on with your current setup, it does versioning nicely (new copy every day) but it will still suck the Gigs down in storage space–not sure how to set auto delete of old backup in Win 7. If you don’t need versioning, just a backup, syncronized or not, and don’t have to worry about disk space usage growing out of control on the backup, try something like AllSync, Syncback or even Microsoft’s own tool, SyncToy. Those options all make one to one backups as well so you can see if the backup is working correctly by spot-checking and if using true syncronization, it doesn’t matter where you get the file from and work on it…it will syncronize to the other location and be backed up. For me, that is important and also the one to one backup is important…I think Windows 7 just zips everything up and you think its backed up but you have no way of knowing for sure unless you can crack open the right zip file and take a look…not acceptable under the policy of best practices…unless there is an additional 2nd backup location…say online or some other off site method…then its not as risky, and when I say risky, I don’t mean there is a high risk, just slightly more risk than keeping a backup one to one.

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I recreate images whenever something changes on my PC, which is much less than once per day. That is overkill. The Win 7 Back up and Restore is a basic tool. It does not have the feature set that Acronis has, so do not expect it to do all the things Acronis did for you, you will be dsappointed. I use both Acronis 2010 (wife’s PC) and Acronis 2011 for my PC. I am very happy with these 2 versions of Acronis.

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It is a good idea to have previous versions of files, not just one backup. I once had an Excel spreadsheet that had gotten corrupted. My backup was corrupted too. But with Windows Backup I went back to a week prior, and that version was good. So I back up using Windows Backup (running on Win 7) weekly. I have a big external disk dedicated to it. When it gets full, Windows backup will delete the oldest versions, so I will always have several versions available.

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Hey Everyone,

I’m big on backing up my computer & am using Windows 7 Ultimate and have a few question:

1. I created a Win 7 X64 Recovery Disk just in case I can’t boot. I booted with it, is that enough?
2. I set up a back-up to run every night at 3AM & it includes a system image and is stored on my external USB hard drive. Is a nightly back-up too much?
3. My External USB hard drive keeps filling up, is there a way to set limits, when I set up the back-ups, I said let windows decide, I see I have back-up to Dec 14th when I started this process.
4. On my XP system I used Acronis TI and I could set 7 days worth of back-ups for recovery, can I do that now with Win 7, HOW?

Thanks for any Help,

Steve

1 Any bootable media should be thoroughly tested, not merly for booting, but also for access to the backup location, and an actual restore should be done to verify this.
2 Judging the need to do nightly backups is something only you can determine. For most of us it’s a complete waste of time and diskspace.
3 Windows 7 backup and restore will continue until you have no space left, after which time it will delete older backups first.

If you need to run nightly backup regimens, I would recommend you go back to using Acronis. Windows 7 backup and restore is a basic solution.
Acronis is far more adept at configuring schedules and incremental type backup needs and for deleting older outdated images/backups so that external drives do not overfill.

You will be far more limited with the use of Windows 7 backup and restore with regard to advanced schedules than Acronis TI.

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Thanks everyone for the reply’s

I wasn’t expecting Win 7 back-up to have all the features of Acronis TI had. I just really want a basic back-up in case I can’t restart my computer (I created a restart CD for Win 7X64) but want everything I had when I last backed it up in case of a problem, like some nasty virus etc. I just choose daily as my computer is up 24 X 7 and the back-up runs at 3AM, so it doesn’t bother me & seems to complete in about 15-20 minutes. I have an external USB 500GB hard drive which only holds these back-ups & some music & pictures I have but not much else.

Thanks again for your thoughts,

Steve

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