"Robert Brereton" wrote:
What backup scheme do you
think I should set up for her? She will have an external HD.
I do a complete image after each 'patch Tuesday' and back up data files to
an NAS drive and an external USB drive whenever they are changed. I also
copy the data to a secondary USB drive which gets ejected from the PC after
the backup and stored elsewhere each night.
A complete disk image is a very useful thing to have, because if the Hard
disk fails or gets corrupted it can be up and running in pretty short order,
instead of spending several days getting it back to the state it was in
before the problems.
This is an instructive and timely thread for me, as I'm new to Win 10
(15 years with XP) and am in the early stages of getting my backup
methods organised. So rather than starting a new thread on a very
similar topic may I raise a few queries of my own please (which may
also prove helpful to Alek)?
On this desktop i7 PC, my OS, programs and as many data files as
possible are on C: which is a 256 GB SSD. Large data folders such as
Pictures, Video and Music are on my 4 TB internal HD, and that is also
my main intended backup target for C. Externally I have two HDs, G (3
TB) and H (2 TB).
So far I've been using my trusty backup program, Second Copy, backing
up C to D, and D (apart from the C b/u) to G. But after some reading,
reinforced by suggestions up-thread here, I'm considering changing
this to a mix of File History and/or Image Backup. (Any other
candidates?)
One point on which I'm still not clear is how I recover a backed up
file from an image, or indeed if it's possible at all. The following
about the 'System Image Backup utility' from
http://www.windowscentral.com/how-ma...kup-windows-pc seems to
contain a contradiction of itself:
"The downside is that you cannot choose to restore individual files.
It's meant to restore everything, bit-by-bit to the same (or
replacement) hard drive. (Though, you can easily access the backup
files and extract documents, photos, music, and other files, if you
need to.)"
Q1: So what is the practical distinction there, between restoring and
accessing? If I can access a file, can I not then simply save it in
the required restore location?
Q2: I tried an Image Backup, accepting the recommendation to save it
on D. That now contains several new folders (mixed in with my own data
folders): TERRY-2016, WindowsImageBackup and MediaID.bin, all of which
are 0 bytes in size according to their respective properties.
Q3. After doing a Win 10 Backup of C (or is it called Win 7?) I got a
report that there were skipped files, and the list displayed included
these:
Backup skipped backing up D:\Music as it is on the backup target.
Backup skipped backing up D:\Pictures as it is on the backup target.
Backup skipped backing up D:\Videos+Projects as it is on the backup
target.
So has Win 10 intelligently recognised that I've created new folders
with those names, leaving the original Music, Pictures and Video
default folders unused? Presumably it hasn't tried to backup any other
data files on D?!
--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK