What's a great backup and restore utility for home use?

E

easymon1

Has anyone used EaseUS Todo Backup Free, or another disk backup utility you've had good experience with?

From CNet - "Editors' Rating: 5 Spectacular, Average User Rating: 3.5, . . . Good backup utilities that combine maximum user friendliness with excellent functionality and some helpful extras take the chore out of an essential duty. When all that comes for free, the excuse to blow off backups wears thin. Easeus Todo Backup is just such a free backup and restore utility."
 
+1 "Acronis" or Shadowprotect for System image restore

When it comes to Backing up valuable and irreplaceable data, money isn't an issue, i.e. your child's first steps, first words, etc... "Free is seldom the best choice"

I prefer a reliable service in addition to physical HDD's. Drives can fail, degauss, fire, lost, stolen etc...,

I use a 2 tier backup method for my most valuable data [Family Photo's, financial & legal records, etc.]

1st Tier: Copy to removable / external drive via Swap Tray's and USB ext drive's. Store copies at safe off site locations [summer home, in-laws house, safe deposit box. -- [multiple copies / multiple locations]

2nd Tier: Off site cloud storage service. I like Google drive for my daily files, photo's etc... It syncs files between all my computers and devices and is fully integrated with my other google services. I also have a DropBox acct which I use for Storage and redundancy.
Drop Box may be a more refined product, I just like the convenience gDrive provides me. Personal preference

[caveat being that one can accidentally delete all files as well with either] hence the redundancy of physical copies and cloud storage providers in the event of a catastrophic event or fat finger error.

For real time offline backup/cloud storage: Carbonite, Crashplan are solid products as well.

http://lifehacker.com/five-best-online-backup-services-1006345049
 
easymon1 said:
Dry Run
What's a good way to go through a hard disk disaster recovery Dry Run without putting your dealio at risk?
More...

That's a very legitimate question. And to be honest, I've never heard of one work and have ony heard of them not being successful. Maybe only people who experience failures are vocal about it, or maybe none of them work.

Anyone ever seen one work successfully?
 
I use Safecopy and am very satisfied. It's inexpensive and has some nice features like saving a version history and backup all your PC's to one account, but most importantly, it just works automatically, more than can be said about some other services I tried (*ahem* carbonite)
 
easymon1 said:
Dry Run
What's a good way to go through a hard disk disaster recovery Dry Run without putting your dealio at risk?
More...

If your drive has been corrupted, trying to get the bad stuff off could/likely leave at least some of the good stuff fouled as well.

If your drive simply dies, there may be no (or no easy, inexpensive) recovery at all.

IMV, the best solution is to "image" your system periodically. So instead of trying to fix the current mess, you just "restore" a prior image. That what Acronis, Macrium, others do.

When you image, you're not just backing up valuable data.... you're also backing up your OS and all of your custom settings and emails.
 
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