Understood; one last question if I may. Eventually,
my Seagate 1TB External HD is going to fill up. So
do I start deleting backups and system images or do
I just buy another external HD?
What do you guys do?
Thanks,
Robert
If you're a home user like us, you're probably
not all that organized. And you'll forget to do the
backups, before you run out of disk space
It you're a paid IT person, who does nothing
but backups, the boss will make you use "best
practice". Some "pattern" which everyone in the
industry uses, whatever that is.
So I'll just make one up.
*******
You can use a variable density method.
Let's take my 20GB C: and my 1TB drive as an
example. I have room for 50 full backups.
Now, say I adopt the following pattern.
I back up every day. I keep one backup
at the end of the week. I keep four weekly
backups until the end of the month. I keep one
of those as a monthly backup. I keep the monthly
backups for a year. At the end of a year, I recycle
the monthly ones, and keep just one of them (say Dec)
as my yearly backup. That's about 23 rotating
backups, and an accumulation of one per year after
that. In 27 years time, (2040), I've used up
my 50 storage slots.
....
2010 Yearly \
2011 Yearly \__ These accumulate
2012 Yearly / Yearly
Jan monthly \
Feb monthly \
Mar monthly \
.... \
Nov monthly \
Week 1 (weekly) \___ These rotate
Week 2 (weekly) / Daily, weekly, monthly
Week 3 (weekly) /
Week 4 (weekly) /
Mon /
Tues /
Wed /
.... /
Sun /
So later, if today is Wednesday, and I lost a file
or ruined my registry, I could restore from the Tuesday
file. The density is very high, in the near term, because
I place the most value on the things I've done recently.
Whereas, a file I edited a year ago, I probably don't
need daily resolution in my archiving. Instead of keeping
365 backups, I keep just one of those for future consideration.
That is balancing the odds I'll never need to access the
yearly at all, versus needing to check back to see if I
have a copy.
I have needed to go back that far. One experiment I was
doing, I needed to go back two years, to find a clean
enough WinXP image, for the experiment I was doing. More
recent backups had the problem in them, and couldn't be
used. But I normally, never need to go back that far.
Most of the time, yesterday's backup is the one I need.
*******
To do the chart and pattern, you almost need a calendar program,
to tell you which file to toss, which file to keep and
re-label, and so on. It's very confusing!
Now, in addition to that, you need both software
redundancy and hardware redundancy. I can
combine both concepts, in a less than ideal way.
I can do two backups a day. I do an Acronis one,
with the 23 rotating backup pattern above, to one
hard drive. I can do a Macrium Reflect one, to a
second hard drive, having its own 23 rotating backups
made with Macrium. If a backup hard drive fails, I
still have my backups on the other drive (like a RAID 1
mirror in a sense).
If I find I go to do a restoration, and my Macrium
software is somehow broken, I can take the second
drive, and try to restore the Acronis backup I made.
Between the two brands of software, one of them is
bound to work.
See how complicated this is ? You almost
need a backup software, that incorporates best practice
in its scheduler, and it tells you what to do.
If you keep track of this with paper, you're
sure to screw up the pattern.
Some people keep a yearly or two, in their
safety deposit box. Someone with significant
banking records say, might do that. You might
occasionally make a DVD out of the most valuable
files, for later.
So that's a scheme I just made up for your amusement.
IT people have some kind of "pattern" they use, which
balances cost and storage space, versus the needs
of the users. If the users decide "monthlies forever"
is the way to go, I'll be using up my 50 storage
slots a lot faster.
My own backups are event based. My hard drive is
failing (SMART statistics look bad), I make a full image,
and store that somewhere. Two years from now, I realize
that file is obsolete or not worth much, and overwrite
with some other backup. Some backups are made, because
I need insurance for an experiment, and I leave the backup
there (lazy), and it comes in handy months later. That's
how a home user thinks. In a "not organized" way. My
backup density is erratic at best.
Enjoy,
Paul
