6 ms·

I'd love to take more backups, but is there a decent backup software (paid or free) for Windows? I have my doubts... While I use the Win7 backup system on my W

by tjoff 15y ago

I'd love to take more backups, but is there a decent backup software (paid or free) for Windows? I have my doubts... While I use the Win7 backup system on my WS it does make me feel a bit uneasy, I feel I have no control over it whatsoever. It doesn't do incremental backups. I have no say in how long they should be stored, the backups are stored in a weird way with hundreds of zip-files and I've found no easy way to browse them or restore just a lost file and I haven't even dared to use the restore options because I feel like I'm going to blow something up (so maybe you can do that, but the UI is just bad). Also I get no report that a backup was successful or if it has failed and I can't tell it to delete old backups). I've used Acronis True Image before and I really wanted to like it but... I used it to, among other things, back up some network drives. All was fine and I got confirmation that everything was fine every week, but one day I skimmed through the logs and found out that the network drives hadn't been backed up but Acronis still said that the whole operation was a success. I can't even begin to comprehend the absolute lunacy about ignoring some failures in a backup program. Maybe they've fixed this now but they have a long way to restore my trust. Also when doing incremental backups you can not anywhere state that I wan't a complete backup after x incremental backups. You have to manually move the old backups to force it to do a complete backup again, and it won't delete backups older than x months/years so you have to manually clean up or else your backups will constantly increase for all eternity. This should be about the third or fourth feature you implement in a backup program and all it would take is like 10 lines of code and a checkbox. So, still having a hard time to see how one couldn't be better than Acronis I stumbled upon EaseUS Todo Backup Workstation but you can't do incremental backups of your OS (seriously?), so I've resorted to doing incremental partition images but I'm mighty unimpressed by the GUI and I don't feel safe at all. Seriously guys, this shouldn't be hard! I just want incremental backups of my OS (but a complete backup after x incremental backups and auto-delete after say 2 years), easy to do a complete restore or just browse old files and a working reporting system (even mail will be enough, just don't say everything is fine when it isn't). I can't imagine something being more simple than those basic needs and I've yet to find anything decent. It would be nice to be able to take a daily backup for the last x days and then only keep one for every week for y weeks and then only keep one for every month for z months but I have completely given up my hope of finding something "advanced" enough to handle something like that.

Swizec 15y ago
I think this is one of those problems where it looks like a weekend, a week at most, job ... until you actually start implementing it. That said, I would also love a backup system like what you describe. If it could also detect imminent HDD failure (say, the first bad sector pops up) and warn me that I need to backup my backups NOW. That would be splendid. Furthermore, I don't really have anything to back up. Everything I actually need is stored on git/github, everything else is downloadable via torrents.
- tjoff 15y ago
  I surely have respect for the problem of making a backup securely while the system is running, but this is of course something that all backup vendors have had to do regardless of their featureset. Or they could just use the inbuilt service from Microsoft and be done ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy , right?). It should be a solved problem by now. But there is no excuse in having a poor UI or neglecting important aspects of backups. I've always have had the feeling that "no one that developed this tool has ever used it for themselves for other than testing purposes". None of them I've tried have the option of deleting backups that are old automatically and everyone that has ever used a backup program will think of this when, after a year, their backups are getting somewhat big. It's so obvious it hurts my soul, and I'm about to trust them with my data? And perhaps even pay them to handle my data? Just compare with all the numerous rsync scripts people do. Automatic deletion is among the first features you implement. And that isn't a weekend project, that is a coffee-break project. In Microsofts backup tool you can get a list of old backups in order to delete one if you like, the list in which they list your backups isn't even sorted - not by date or size, just random (with no way to sort it). They have put no effort in it at all (I first thought that the backups for a few months was missing), the attention to detail (in all the software I've tried) is just nonexistent.
  - Swizec 15y ago
    The issue with big backups isn't that these people aren't using their own software, it's that they are big companies who consider disk space to be essentially free. Why would you delete possibly old data if you are so rich the price of keeping infinite amounts of data doesn't even register? (or is less than the cost of losing data)

by tjoff 15y ago

Swizec 15y ago

I think this is one of those problems where it looks like a weekend, a week at most, job ... until you actually start implementing it. That said, I would also love a backup system like what you describe. If it could also detect imminent HDD failure (say, the first bad sector pops up) and warn me that I need to backup my backups NOW. That would be splendid. Furthermore, I don't really have anything to back up. Everything I actually need is stored on git/github, everything else is downloadable via torrents.

tjoff 15y ago
I surely have respect for the problem of making a backup securely while the system is running, but this is of course something that all backup vendors have had to do regardless of their featureset. Or they could just use the inbuilt service from Microsoft and be done ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy , right?). It should be a solved problem by now. But there is no excuse in having a poor UI or neglecting important aspects of backups. I've always have had the feeling that "no one that developed this tool has ever used it for themselves for other than testing purposes". None of them I've tried have the option of deleting backups that are old automatically and everyone that has ever used a backup program will think of this when, after a year, their backups are getting somewhat big. It's so obvious it hurts my soul, and I'm about to trust them with my data? And perhaps even pay them to handle my data? Just compare with all the numerous rsync scripts people do. Automatic deletion is among the first features you implement. And that isn't a weekend project, that is a coffee-break project. In Microsofts backup tool you can get a list of old backups in order to delete one if you like, the list in which they list your backups isn't even sorted - not by date or size, just random (with no way to sort it). They have put no effort in it at all (I first thought that the backups for a few months was missing), the attention to detail (in all the software I've tried) is just nonexistent.
- Swizec 15y ago
  The issue with big backups isn't that these people aren't using their own software, it's that they are big companies who consider disk space to be essentially free. Why would you delete possibly old data if you are so rich the price of keeping infinite amounts of data doesn't even register? (or is less than the cost of losing data)