Preferred method for backup

[Mist]

Hi,

Windows XP, SP3
XPExplorer 10.20 Pro
"X" = external drive volume

Don't want to start a fight here but would like to know what is considered the preferred (best) method of backup.

My setup is based on the idea that if a volume hasn't been accessed since last backup, the backup should be good. It also saves time and disc real estate.

C: = Root
D: = Programs (non-OS)
E: = Data
F: = Multimedia
and so on.

X: = backup folders on an external disc for the above.
X:\E:\How Weather Happens.pdf

Question: How to get information from C, D, E... to it's proper location on X with a minimum of fuss?

Thanks,
Mist

[Jerry]

Seeing that there are no replies yet this post, I'll throw in my "2 cents", FWIW:

I use 3 separate programs for doing all my backups, because there 3 distinct backup use cases that are important to me:

1. Backup4all: I use this to backup all my stuff that's not music or video and I use the Differential approach which involves creating an initial Full backup and then each successive backup is just a differential off of that. Differential (not to be confused with incremental) means that the each differential will contain everything that changed since the last Full. So you get redundancy which is good, plus if you ever have to do a full restore, you just need the last Full and the very last Differential.

I chose Backup4all because it uses regular zip files for its output. And it can create very large zip files -- my Full zips are over 150GB, for example. But you can customize that. Among many other things, you can of course customize what you backup, what to exclude, schedules, etc. It also has versioning.

2. AJCSync: I use this to do synchronized/mirror backups of my media drives, which each contain 1 to 1.5TB of files. In this case, I don't care about versioning and don't need the multiple redundancy and overhead of differential backups -- all I want is a single mirror backup or my media drives as they exist currently. With AJCSync, I can easily see what's out of sync, manually deal with things like renames and moves myself (to minimize I/O and fragmentation) and otherwise have it kick off the synchronization with byte verification. I have worked with the author of AJCSync in his forum to vastly increase the performance of his version 3 program.

I also use AJCSync to synchronize my primary and secondary backup drives that contain the Backup4All zips and the Windows 7 system images (see #3 below).

3. Windows 7 System Image While I won't touch the regular Windows 7 Backup with a 10 foot pole, MS did get some things right with Windows 7 by adding the System Image backup function and Repartitioning. So I repartitioned my system C: drive to a minimum size and only make it contain stuff that Windows or other apps (that I can't control) put there. Then once a month I do an image backup of that system partition, which is currently about 32GB of bytes. I then follow that with AJCSync to a make a mirror copy of the system image on my secondary backup drive.

I hope some of this is helpful.

[Mist]

Thanks for the response and the information.

I'm on XP but think that Paragon should work in lieu of Windows.

If you've heard anything bad about Paragon, don't be bashful.

Thanks again,

Mist