Any good suggestions for Win 7 backup software? I'm currently using WD Smartware, which the external drive came with, but it's a real POS and a PITA, and I hates it forever.

I'd LIKE something that does full, incremental & differential backups, and can handle maintaining the same backup set on two or more external drives.

Have you considered Norton Ghost?

The amazonians do not give me a warm fuzzy regarding the 64 bit version of this: http://www.amazon.com/Sym...ewpoints=0

We use Backup Exec. It's a Symantec product, too. Might be overkill if you're talking about a home environment.

Try a Drobo or other RAID system for primary and then an encrypted cloud backup (eg. Crash Plan is my preference), and rotate out your Drobo drives to off site.

As my favorite quote goes - if you don't have three backups, one of which is away from your computer, you don't really have a backup.

It does sound like the emergency boot disk Ghost 15 creates for Windows 7 only supports 32-bit drivers so if you don't have 32-bit driver(s) for the hardware devices you need to access you'd be in trouble. I'd be surprised if you can't find 32-bit drivers, though.

Perhaps something from one of these places?

http://www.acronis.com/

http://www.novastor.com/

Carbonite

http://www.carbonite.com

If you use an online backup, be sure your ISP doesn't pull this trick:

http://www.wired.com/busi...e-comcast/

I'm trying to avoid an online solution, simply because the initial backup set would be so large - I've got close to 500g of photos and movies, I'd rather not wait a week sending it all down the pipe.

My current plan (which was working before smartware puked) was to alternate between backup devices, with one always kept at work to minimize the amount of data lost should I somehow lose both the internal disk AND the external.

It depends on how much you are backing up.

In the past I have set up a batchfile xxcopy of the folders/files wanted. The bactch file was set to run after the client left the office at night. Monday through Friday it did a backup onto a usb drive. Each one labelled as such. In the morning they would take the one from offsite and put it in the safe, and put the corresponding day one in the usb slot, and place the one that had backed up overnight somewhere to be taken with them overnight. At any giving time they have 5 backups from the last 5 working days.

Then Onsite I had them have an external hard drive. I created a batchfile that would check the drive for folders. The structure was 26 weeks worth of backup done on friday night. Folder 1 - folder 26. If the next foldr didnt exist it would create it and back up. If all folders existed, delete the folder 26, and rename each one by renaming folder 25 to folder 26, 24 to 25, 23 to 24.... Until there is no folder 1. At that point the folder 1 was created and backed up into. It was a full xxcopy of the drive.

I had log files created of the files backed up and status meaning successful or failed. The office staff could easily look at the drive and check folder creation date to ensure the backup ran along with looking at files or log file if they wanted to re assure themselves.

Last 5 backups and the last 26 weeks worth of full backups. It was all set to run automatically. Just change usb drives in the morning and go to work.

The reason I did this was the previous staff was always confused about the backup software, and was having problems making sure files were backed up valid. The had such a problem that they ended up not backing up. After I was called for a hard disk crash it cost 1800+ for recovery but thankfully they got a complete recovery.

Just a thought...

64 bit os has its issues...your best bet in my opinion would be a mirror of some sort....raid or other...but a backup can only be truly verified if you have to use it. the mirror idea using redundancy technology is awsome as drive prices have plummeted

One of the problems with Raid is the drive itself is in the PC. In case of a fire in the building, the drive may be compromised. I have seen drives survive fires to be cloned to new ones on many occasions. I have done so for several customers.

For a piece of mind, having a backup off site is nice. The problem with that is the backup usually only consists of the data and not the whole hard disk in bootable form. You would have to reinstall all software, all settings and updates before being able to restore the data.

In order to keep from having to do that, you would want a hard drive cloned/backup but it takes quite a bit of time and space to create as Windows bloats itself, along with all the programs and data.

With Raid if the database gets a small corruption that eventually leads to a crash of the database, that corruption can be mirrored also. I have seen several times that a restore of a back up led to a follow up crash. To get around that multiple backups can help.

So what it gets down to is, how valuable is you data. Can you restore all the programs, updates, drivers... and data. Do you have the time for lengthy backups...

As Tim pointed out, RAID is not a backup. When data corrupts at a level higher than RAID, the corrupted data will blindly replicate across the array - destroying good data in the process. Poof. Gone. At that point you'll wish you had said goodbye. Or had a backup.

The advantage of online back up is that it's at a different site. No matter how much you back up, if the back up is in the same desk that the computer is on and there's a fire, everything is still gone.

I have no personal experience with Carbonite but they advertise on every podcast I listen to and people say that the initial upload does suck and takes a week or so to get through but after that it's not too bandwidth intensive.

Online backup would be a good solition if you get faster uploads than what the ISP's in Miles City provides.

I get about 58KB uploads compared tp 300KB+ downloads. ( Midrivers 3MB )

My relatives in Casper Wyoming get 40MB down and 20MB up...

I downloaded on his machine via teamviewer (remote) what would have taken me 15 - 20 minutes in literally a minute or less. This all the while his machine was screen sharing to me.

When the ISP's bring us out of the dark age, online backups will get better.

That is if you want your data on someone elses machine.

Wow, I didn't realize the upload was so slow on DSL. It still beats the heck out of satellite, but that's pretty lame.