Backup solutions?

[brainbone]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Out of curiosity, does anyone have a recommendation for good imaging software that will do scheduled incremental backups to network shares?

Take a look at R-Drive Image. Its' 15 day trial should be enough to see if it fits your needs.

[blade]

What I'm looking for is a simple and secure way to back my sister's computer up to a server at my house. I'd like to create the image while her computer is connected to my home network and then have it update the image across the internet on a regular basis. Not exactly sure how often yet.

I ran across a free program called CrashPlan that I believe has the option to do exactly what I want, but haven't tried it yet. I'm still researching other possible options. I've read a little on a FTP server on a NAS and VPNs, but I'm just not sure which route to go.

[aflat]

I use Corbain to do file backups, and DriveXML for image backups, they both allow you to back up a running system using Volume Shadow copy, and both have free editions that do way more then I could ever need. I have a USB dock that I drop a sata drive into, run the backups, then take it to work. I have another one in the dock to handle incremental daily backups, and I try to swap it with the one at work on mondays. I forget sometimes, but it should cover most disasters I could come up with.

[ytulpan]

R-Drive image works fine for me in a Server 2008 environment. It does differential and incremental images, deals decently with backup sets, uses VSS correctly and is quite fast.

[SageDonkey]

I have always had Acronis to image the system disk and never really researched anything else. Never had to use it though for disaster recovery...until this weekend. System disk starting clicking then died a horrible death. Pushed in a new disk, imaged from the NAS, and was back up in 2 hours (kids were being a bit difficult, so it wasn't a 100% dedicated task).

[Folkboat]

Fortunately I haven't had a reason to use it, however "Paragon Backup and Recovery" FREE version http://www.paragon-software.com/home/db-express/
seems to work quit well.

My C: boot drive ie: WinXP, SageTV (320GB).....is installed in a removable enclosure, I also have a spare 320GB drive.
(I did this to see if WIN7 Media Center was worth considering, and how SageTV plays with WIN7 and also to see which cloning, imaging software I liked)

For pure cloning I liked xxclone.
For media backups I use "second copy".
For multiple saved images Paragon worked very well, it creates a comprehensive boot CD or USB flash drive.
It restored images to a blank disk every time.............

Frankly I was skeptical - its free, I was prepared to pay for it, perhaps there seeding philosophy works and I will eventually buy the upgraded version!!!

Regards

[davephan]

Have you tried scheduling backups with Acronis to a secondary drive on the same computer? I assume you are just imaging the C drive. You can then use Microsoft's free Synctoy to automatically replicate the directory to the network share.

Dave

[rmac321]

I find it curious with all the people who use WHS on this forum that no one has suggested it as a solution. I'm not looking to start a WHS vs RAID war, but for redundancy, WHS is a good solution plus you get automatic backups of other computers on your network. You also have the ability to add non-pool drives to create backups of the pool and/or the backed up computer database that can be stored in a different location.

[korben_dallas]

Check out ShadowCopy and DriveImage XML. Both are free. They use Microsoft's Volume Shadow Service (XP, 2k3, Vista, 7) so you can copy open / locked files. They can be command-line scripted. I have my SageTV directory backed up every night automated with ShadowCopy.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by rmac321

I find it curious with all the people who use WHS on this forum that no one has suggested it as a solution. I'm not looking to start a WHS vs RAID war, but for redundancy, WHS is a good solution plus you get automatic backups of other computers on your network. You also have the ability to add non-pool drives to create backups of the pool and/or the backed up computer database that can be stored in a different location.

The WHS computer itself has a major flaw, it cannot backup it's own operating system! Supposedly, the next release of WHS is going to solve that problem. However, past Microsoft backup solutions often result in failed recoveries. That is why there are third party backup solutions, because of Microsoft's poor track record.

If the SageTV computer uses WHS, and it fails, then you have to manually rebuild. If you use another computer that is WHS to backup the SageTV computer that runs something other than WHS itself, and the WHS backup computer's operating system fails, then that system has to be manually rebuilt first to recover the SageTV computer. I don't know if the backup taken by the second computer running WHS can recover any other computer to a bootable state. An image can recover a non-bootable computer to a bootable state.

The ability of WHS to use different drive sizes is a big plus. But WHS has many serious downsides. The recoveries have to be tested several times to make sure that they can be done consistently. If the recoveries sometimes fail, that just isn't good enough. The whole point to taking backups in the first place is to have a very high probability of a successful recovery.

Dave