Hooked up my external drive last night and set my new lappy to do her backup (yes it's a her... duh?). It of course took forever.
What I'm wondering is, does the backup process "recopy" the entire backup each time or does it get quicker in time as it backs up only that which has changed? Trying to determine if I'm going to need to do like a once a month leaving of the laptop on all night or if things will go faster from now on.
Thanks guys!
You know it's really quite remarkable how far the Help menu has come along since the early Windows days. I typed in the keywords "backup" into the Help search field and one of the links that turned up was frequently asked questions.
In that link the first bullet point listed was the folllowing:
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"Backups are created in sets known as backup periods. To help maximize your disk space, Windows Backup backs up all selected folders the first time it's run
and then it only backs up files that are new or have been modified since the last backup was made.
Periodically, Windows creates a new, full backup. Each full backup is known as a backup period. When you view your file backups, you see all of the backup periods labeled with date ranges. If you decide to delete file backups, you should always keep the most recent file backup.
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(Emphasis added is mine).
So to answer your question, it seems it's capable of doing incremental backups. I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences as I invariably run into a few customers who want to know about the new features in Win7.
I personally prefer using imaging software. (Different from doing backups in the sens that it compresses the information on the partition or the drive). I've been a long time user of Acronis True Image which I have been using for ... 7 yrs?... 8 yrs? quite a while. When I was running Win XP, version 8 and 10 were rock solid. it's what I recommended. I just bought the 2010 home version and it's too soon to say anything positive or negative about it. I need to give it a fair shake before I recommend it. The one problem with Acronis is that they tend to release some buggy versions. They just released their 2011 version - supposedly it's better than the 2010 version. I feel no urge to upgrade because I I bought the 2010 version specifically for the fact that's it's compatible with the Win7 OS.
Two alternatives that hasn't been mentioned thus far as Norton Ghost and StorageCraft ShadowProtect. I have not tried the latter but I have used Norton Ghost back in the WinXP days - it was reliable and trustworthy. But because I am such a creature of habit - I stuck with Acronis.
I think you've gotten some good recommendations thus far. Whatever you end up using , make sure it's compatible with Win7 and that YOU LIKE IT. Good luck
