Managing Backup: Three Software Solutions Compared

From: Tom's Hardware Guide

2:00 AM - 12/26/2009 by Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos

Table of contents

• 1 – Backup Done Right
• 2 – Backup Fundamentals: Why, How, When, and How Often?
• 3 – Back Up To External Hard Drives
• 4 – Solution 1: Windows 7 Backup...
• 5 – …and Restore

• 6 – Solution 2: Acronis True Image Home 2010
• 7 – Options And Recovery
• 8 – Solution 3: Rebit
• 9 – Conclusion
• 10 – More on this topic

Backup has always been a topic that most people find tedious and boring. It takes time to consider and set up, then it typically works in the background, sucking up system resources while delivering no tangible benefits—until the day your hard drive suddenly crashes. What then? “Where was the last backup again? When did I run the last backup?”

Clearly, you want to avoid these questions and have an emergency plan in place. We recently reviewed a storage product that finally makes total system and file backup a piece of cake. We decided to look for additional options and compared Rebit, True Image by Acronis, and the Windows 7 integrated backup feature using a portable hard drive.
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Backup Options
The first item users typically consider is the backup target device. While the term “backup” is still somewhat associated with tape and other complicated devices, backup isn’t married to any given storage product. Tape drives were the primary backup targets in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Such devices are still in use, but mainly in enterprise environments. Consumers typically use optical drives, hard drives, or network targets for backup, with the significant drops in cost per gigabyte putting hard drives in the lead.

Few would argue that tape backup is the worst choice for consumers today. You need proprietary tapes and a compatible drive, as well as suitable backup software. This means that you have to restore a working backup/restore host system before you can access your data. Recordable DVD or Blu-ray media are well-suited for backup, as write speeds are fast enough, media costs run from cheap (DVD) to still acceptable (BD-R), and you get automatic versioning because write-once discs can’t be modified after write completion.

Hard Drives With USB Are the Winners

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Interesting

I use Paragon Backup and have for some time, i backup the complete OS to a external Hard Drive, in the case of a system failure i can boot from a Paragon recovery CD and replace the OS with the archive OS, from a none bootable system to a fully operational system in a few minuets, i believe its very important to backup.

Paragon works with

Thanks Nibiru and Veedaz, I am currently working through a HDD of my wife’s that was not backed up correctly prior to a format and W7 install with Get Data: Recover My Files... for some reason still unknown to me Norton did not back up all the selected files... bye bye Norton and shame on me for not having a better back up solution as RMF shows me the files but a lot of them are corrupt. L

My wife blames me for the mess and in all honesty how can I not accept it as I should have checked the backed up files prior to formatting... lesson learnt?!?!

I will read the above guide with great interest and research the best program for my needs as soon as I recover as many files as I can for my wife. Thanks again.