Back-Up Data

  • Thread starter Thread starter Terry Bennett
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Terry Bennett

Is there a simple way of backing-up only 'My Documents' files that have
changed since the last back-up?

I have Norton Ghost but that insists on backing-up the full 15Gb of my C
Drive each time it is run, taking c 4 hours. Of this, My Documents accounts
for a little over 2Gb and, of course, only a fraction of the files will have
changed between back-ups which I conduct on a weekly basis (to an external
hard drive).

At the moment the best I can do is to drag and drop the My Documents folders
and let them overwrite everything from the previous back-up: a lot faster
than Ghost but still seems a bit laborious!

I'm sure there's a better way?!
 
Terry said:
Is there a simple way of backing-up only 'My Documents' files that
have changed since the last back-up?

I have Norton Ghost but that insists on backing-up the full 15Gb of my
C
Drive each time it is run, taking c 4 hours. Of this, My Documents
accounts for a little over 2Gb and, of course, only a fraction of the
files will have changed between back-ups which I conduct on a weekly
basis (to an external hard drive).

At the moment the best I can do is to drag and drop the My Documents
folders and let them overwrite everything from the previous back-up: a
lot faster than Ghost but still seems a bit laborious!

I'm sure there's a better way?!
Click to expand...

I like SecondCopy from www.centered.com for this. It will do exactly
what you want (and more!) and is very reasonably priced.

Malke
 
Is there a simple way of backing-up only 'My Documents' files that have
changed since the last back-up?

I have Norton Ghost but that insists on backing-up the full 15Gb of my C
Drive each time it is run, taking c 4 hours. Of this, My Documents accounts
for a little over 2Gb and, of course, only a fraction of the files will have
changed between back-ups which I conduct on a weekly basis (to an external
hard drive).

At the moment the best I can do is to drag and drop the My Documents folders
and let them overwrite everything from the previous back-up: a lot faster
than Ghost but still seems a bit laborious!

I'm sure there's a better way?!
Click to expand...

This is a situation where a backup program is a better fit than a full
system imaging program. Both have their place and it's not unusual to use
them in combination to protect personal data and the system state.

NOTE: True Image does have the option to "append" to your last image,
recording only changes to the partition. While many folks like this
feature, I tend to shy away from it. If one of those additions fail, you
could lose the entire set of images. Instead, I prefer to make individual
images. This decision is based on the KISS (keep it simple, stupid)
philosophy: Reduce the "whole" of where errors can occur and you will have
less errors to deal with.
 
I can't help but wonder why it would take 4 hours to back up 15GB. Are
you writing to a USB1 device? My C partition is 7.8GB, of which about
1.3 is unused, with a 1GB is Hibernation file (not backed up), and a
256MB Page file (ditto), leaving me with over 5GB to back up. This take
about 10-15 minutes to a DVD+/-RW, using either Ghost 2003 or (my
preference) TrueImage. At this rate, even if your 15GB drive is
completely full you shouldn't take more than about 40 minutes for a
backup. Worth looking into.
 
There'a a free utility called SyncToy available on the microsoft.com
download that will do it for you. It's a neat handy little program.
 
I'm using Ghost 10.0 purchased about 2 months ago. The external Hard Drive
is connected via the USB and a Hub. How can the speeds be improved?
 
Thanks Dave - I've downloaded and installed it!

Dave said:
There'a a free utility called SyncToy available on the microsoft.com
download that will do it for you. It's a neat handy little program.
Click to expand...
 
I'm using Ghost 10.0 purchased about 2 months ago. The external Hard Drive
is connected via the USB and a Hub. How can the speeds be improved?
Click to expand...

USB2 or USB1.x?

From a hardware point of view, USB 1.x could cause throughput
problems/slowdown. USB 1.x (slowest), USB2 (faster), firewire (faster yet),
internal drive (very fast).

There are other considerations though...

-Free space for the imaging program to work with. The temp file for this
has to go somewhere until it's written.

-Rate of compression: higher compression equals longer image creation. I
use the default settings in my imaging program.

-Compressing files that are already compressed can add time to the imaging
process. Example: Not much benefit to be gained by compressing .jpg or .zip
files. In fact, the results for these items can end up larger than what you
started with. Am guessing that using NTFS compression on your local drives
could slow the imaging program down.

I use Acronis' True Image. It takes about 8 minutes to image ~7GB to an
external USB2 hard drive; 5 minutes to image to another local partition.
Another 5-8 minutes to validate the image.

4 hours does seems like a really long time if using Norton's Ghost...
 
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