Now I have never really thought about what im doing but today got me thinking.

I do a backup every two weeks.

I think im backing everything up, is there anyway of checking what has been done on the backup? For example are my picture's and video's been done aswell?

reason for asking is that I copy all picture's into date specific file's on the hard drive.

But if there been backed up im presumably wasteing valuable space by copying them aswell?

Which then leads me back to can I easliy access the picture's and video's on the external hardrive in the backup file?????

I hope you understand what I mean because I have confused myself typing this

What software are you using to backup?

What are you backing up to?

Software? eeeeeerrrrrr just whatever is on the laptop its windows 7 and when I got it advised to backup regularly

And im backing up onto a Hitachi External hardrive

I use a simple free bit of software called Allway Sync which checks and makes a mirror copy of my photo folders onto an external drive.

The best way to check your backup is to do a random restore of a file. If it works then your backup is likely fine. You do have to check though. Even big professional backup solutions regularly **** up.

http://allwaysync.com/

Hi Aspman, whats a mirror copy? I have looked at link but im non the wiser.

I use a simple free bit of software called Allway Sync which checks and makes a mirror copy of my photo folders onto an external drive.

The best way to check your backup is to do a random restore of a file. If it works then your backup is likely fine. You do have to check though. Even big professional backup solutions regularly **** up.

http://allwaysync.com/

It's just a duplicate so I have two copies of all photographs in two different places. The chance of losing one disk is quite high really but the chances of losing two completely different disks at nearly the same time isn't (discounting fire flood etc). Ideally I'd have a remote backup too but I don't have the bandwidth for that and I don't trust the cloud (definitely not the 'free' cloud).

I occasionally make a DVD backup of pictures too as a last resort but that takes a while so I probably only do that quarterly.

It's not a backup if you only have one copy.

Edited 31 July, 201213 yr by Aspman

Even big professional backup solutions regularly **** up.

We have serious issues with Backup Exec. Found the easiest way in the end was to use robocopy to backup files and a separate program for Exchange.

Ideally I'd have a remote backup too but I don't have the bandwidth for that and I don't trust the cloud (definitely not the 'free' cloud).

Bandwidth will be an issue with online backups, Several of our clients use AVG Live Kive, to backup and/or synch between several computers, but they've got less than 4gb of data, so the freebie's ok, at the moment.

Does Allwaysynch continously run in the background? (i.e. fit and forget) Or does it have to be invoked?

Just to throw another bit of software I've heard some good things about this but never got round to set it up...

http://www.bvckup.com/

It does realtime, scheduled and manual back ups so might be worth looking at?

Edited 31 July, 201213 yr by bartsimmo

I have a small NAS on my network and let the software backup once a week. I think it is working OK but suppose I should check :think:

Does Allwaysynch continously run in the background? (i.e. fit and forget) Or does it have to be invoked?

I think it's got options for both. I only fire it up when I've up loaded pictures and vids from my cameras, I like to have as few services running in the background as possible. The free version is very simple but it does what I need.

We had an enterprise backup (arcserve) that was writing 200Gb to the first 20kb of the tape just overwriting continuously. It reported the backup as successful every time. It wasn't spotted for 6 months because no one was doing test restores.

Edited 1 August, 201213 yr by Aspman

I've tried to keep things simple at home. I use Microsoft's SyncToy to make a one way sync to mirror all my files to my external drive. This is scheduled this to run automatically every night. After the first sync, it doesn't take long.

As an extra precaution, I also use CrashPlan+ to back up around 220GBs of my data remotely. This is mainly photos which I would hate to lose if the worst was to happen to my computer and external drive. It can also be used to backup to a local disk, or another computer. You could even use CrashPlan just to back up to your external drive if you wish. This will encrypt your data too, and it will backup each version of the files you're backing up, so you can restore back to a particular time.

http://www.microsoft...s.aspx?id=15155

http://www.crashplan.com/

Edited 1 August, 201213 yr by Ant.

For my really important stuff, I use SpiderOak. It was quite quirky in the early days, but now it's running pretty well. Client-side encryption means it's secure, and it's cross-platform over Windows, Mac and Linux, which was important to me. Not all systems do Linux even though they say they're cross-platform. SpiderOak will let me sync my stuff across all the computers I use regularly, plus put them on their cloud storage platform in case all my computers broke.

I'm also about to try Live Mesh for syncing my Music folder from work to home and vice versa, at the moment I have some stuff duplicated on both machines, some stuff not, etc. Live Mesh only does "peer to peer" syncing, i.e. no cloud storage and both computers have to be switched on, so it's similar to Synctoy in that regard, but I think it'd be much easier to use than Synctoy as it doesn't rely on having a working MS filesharing network which can be an arcane art in itself, particularly if you have different versions of Windows in your home!

edit - although Live Mesh is useless if you only have one computer, somehow I'd read your post and thought you had two, but you want to sync between two drives on the same computer? In that case, Synctoy is pretty hard to beat IMO.