best backup software with USB external hard drives?

I looked at USB hard drives at Best Buy the other day- I plan on buying a 1
TB drive. The backup software all seems similar at least from what the boxes
say.

or would it be better to use third party software like Acronis?

My PC has Vista- the backup software with that is extremely minimal.
Joe

I looked at USB hard drives at Best Buy the other day- I plan on buying a 1 TB drive. The backup software all seems similar at least
from what the boxes say.

or would it be better to use third party software like Acronis?

My PC has Vista- the backup software with that is extremely minimal.

I use robocopy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy ) and mirror my
drives onto my backup drive. Here is my backup.bat file on the drive:

mkdir logs
robocopy \\gui1\c gui1_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\gui1_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\sc\c sc_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\sc_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\ks\c ks_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\ks_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\id\c id_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\id_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\or\c or_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\or_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\hi\c hi_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\hi_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\tx\c tx_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\tx_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\ca\c ca_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\ca_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\io\c io_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\io_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\nd\c nd_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\nd_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\co\c co_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\co_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\sd\c sd_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\sd_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\wv\c wv_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\wv_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\mn\c mn_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\mn_c.txt /tee
robocopy \\ok\c ok_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\ok_c.txt /tee
attrib -h -s gui1_c
attrib -h -s sc_c
attrib -h -s ks_c
attrib -h -s id_c
attrib -h -s or_c
attrib -h -s hi_c
attrib -h -s tx_c
attrib -h -s ca_c
attrib -h -s io_c
attrib -h -s nd_c
attrib -h -s co_c
attrib -h -s ok_c
attrib -h -s sd_c
attrib -h -s wv_c
attrib -h -s mn_c
date /t
time /t
echo "" lasttime
dir
dir logs

Lynn

Joe wrote:
I looked at USB hard drives at Best Buy the other day- I plan on buying a 1
TB drive. The backup software all seems similar at least from what the boxes
say.

or would it be better to use third party software like Acronis?

My PC has Vista- the backup software with that is extremely minimal.
Joe

It depends on your needs. The backup software coming with these things may
negatively surprise you, better not depend on it.

You can either do something using basic commands like robocopy, rsync,
etc., as Lynn suggests.

Or you buy a full-fleged backup software. If you are going to, a lot
of the available commercial backup software options have fundamental
flaws. TrueImage is one of the few that does well in all regards.

My personal solution is to backup Win 7 with Linux, using ntfscopy
for the NTFS system partition and plain GNU tar for the FAT32
data partitions.

Arno
--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans

On 6/16/2010 4:41 AM, Joe wrote:
I looked at USB hard drives at Best Buy the other day- I plan on buying
a 1 TB drive. The backup software all seems similar at least from what
the boxes say.

or would it be better to use third party software like Acronis?

My PC has Vista- the backup software with that is extremely minimal.
Joe

I use the Windows 7 backup, which I hear is a quantum leap better than
anything that came with Windows before, but I have no idea, as I never
used any of the stuff that came in Windows before. I hear one of my
systems has failed in Canada. I have backed it up with the Windows 7
backup, so once I'm back in Canada I'll know how good it is at restore.
Yeesh, why do these things always happen when you're gone?!

Yousuf Khan

Joe wrote:

I looked at USB hard drives at Best Buy the other day- I plan on
buying a 1 TB drive. The backup software all seems similar at least
from what the boxes say.

or would it be better to use third party software like Acronis?

Thats what I prefer, mainly because it give you more capability.

My PC has Vista- the backup software with that is extremely minimal.

On 6/16/2010 06:41, Joe wrote:
I looked at USB hard drives at Best Buy the other day- I plan on buying
a 1 TB drive. The backup software all seems similar at least from what
the boxes say.

I know where my data is. So I only use drag-and-drop to copy files, then
use TreeComp to verify by content!

Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 6/16/2010 4:41 AM, Joe wrote:
I looked at USB hard drives at Best Buy the other day- I plan on buying
a 1 TB drive. The backup software all seems similar at least from what
the boxes say.

or would it be better to use third party software like Acronis?

My PC has Vista- the backup software with that is extremely minimal.
Joe

I use the Windows 7 backup, which I hear is a quantum leap better than
anything that came with Windows before, but I have no idea, as I never
used any of the stuff that came in Windows before. I hear one of my
systems has failed in Canada. I have backed it up with the Windows 7
backup, so once I'm back in Canada I'll know how good it is at restore.
Yeesh, why do these things always happen when you're gone?!

Better entertainment value that way ;-)

Seriously, you absolutely need to test the full restore procedure
before you need it.

Arno
--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans

I waffle between Acronis and PCBackup for my customers. PCB is now
something else, was MIGO but has been renamed again.

One advantage of Acronis is the image you can get, then use that to
rebuild the system, with the overhead of all the extra stuff imaged.
PCB would require a reload of the OS and then a restore to just get your
data.

Or a combination, weekly image with Acronis and a daily with something
else.

One advantage of Acronis is the image you can get, then use that to
rebuild the system, with the overhead of all the extra stuff imaged.
PCB would require a reload of the OS and then a restore to just get your
data.

Does it compress & burn a disk image into a bootable recovery DVD?

Man-wai Chang to The Door (33600bps) wrote:
One advantage of Acronis is the image you can get, then use that to
rebuild the system, with the overhead of all the extra stuff imaged.
PCB would require a reload of the OS and then a restore to just get
your data.

Does it compress & burn a disk image into a bootable recovery DVD?

You can do that, but its generally better to use a bootable
recovery CD that uses the image off an external hard drive
instead. Its a lot quicker to produce that sort of image.