Re: Backup--OT

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

I perhaps have oversold the difficulty of using the Aluratek drive
duplicator. To take out the drive, shove it in the device, add a backup
drive, and get the process started takes about one minute. The duplicating
process itself, for my SSD to copy to a non-SSD hard drive takes about 20
minutes. It's a 128 G drive.
I have two (bare) backup drives that I alternate, doing a dupe about every
10 days.
I have (many, many) other ways of backing up the data. One that I recommend
highly is Dropbox with "pack rat," which I've mentioned before. It saves
*every* version of every file that's in your Dropbox folder. I have over a
thousand versions of some oft-used files. To restore is very easy: you go
to Dropbox.com, log in, and see immediately a directory of everything as it
is now. When you navigate to the file you want a previous version of, you
right click on it and select from the pop up menu "Previous versions" (or
some such wording). You find the one you want and it's one click to
download it to your computer (doesn't overwrite anything, IIRC).
I have all my data files as sub-folders off my C:\Dropbox folder. E.g.,
C:\Dropbox\Eudora7 and C:\Dropbox\xy

I have over 40 Dropbox sub-folders.
Using Dropbox this way is counter-intuitive, but amazingly good. There's no
drag on your system. It uploads files *really* fast and works in the
background (I turned off the little notification messages).

--Harry
I'm also an Acronis TI user, and it has saved the day for me a couple
times in the past, though I don't know how much that really puts it to the
test. I rely on its image backups for a few different computers -- which
I really ought to do more like every couple weeks, rather than the 2 - 3
month intervals I seem to manage -- and just hope for the best.
It is true that the only *drop-in* replacements (no boot-up / restore
process, with images and the software that made them) are full, identical
or equivalent duplicate hard drives. I have done this occasionally in the
past, and may do it again at some point, but it's clearly more of a big
deal to do this, with associated negatives and limitations. Not just
needing a bunch of extra HDDs, which is not cost-prohibitive to the degree
it once was, but that the work involved is much more, and then the job is
only good for a few weeks (at the most) before it would need to be done
again. Then, storing some of these off-site is probably also a better
disaster procedure -- unless your city is hit by an earthquake, or
something. I guess it depends on how vital your backups are.
I facilitated this by standardizing on desktop rigs that had very easily
accessible HDDs and a couple of built-in hard drive controllers, plus
e-SATA ports as an alternate method, providing additional ways of
temporarily hooking up an external drive for direct cloning. USB-3 has
largely replaced e-SATA on newer systems, and should be just as good for
this, if not slightly faster; USB-2 is painfully slow. I know someone who
favors tower desktop systems with pull-out drive trays. That would make
it easy, too. Laptops would probably be the most difficult, for cloning.
But not many will go to this trouble or expense. Conventional imaging
solutions will continue to be the most practical ones, for full boot-drive
backups.


  Jordan



From: Kari Eveli 
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2014 1:34 AM
Subject: Re: Backup--OT

I have used Acronis with success for years despite its somewhat flaky
user interface. Acronis makes a true whole-disk image (sector-by-sector
if needed) that can resized to fit resized partitions.