Automatic Backup??

Hi,
Can you please tell me 'which' backup software listed in your recommendations is the easiest to use for a novice? I'm looking for something automatic. Thanks in advance.:confused

 

How can anything automatic, ever be totally effective and verifiable?

And, Backup what? A few files and folders or your entire C: drive?

And, how will you do a restore if your hard drive crashes and is 100% trashed.???

I've been setting up backup schemes for home and industry, for 29 years now and NO automatic backup has ever met my basic criteria.

Before an effective backup can be done of your C: drive, a thorough cleanup needs to be done on your HD so you're not backing up thousands of meg's of junk.
On my own PC, my pre-backup cleanup removes about four gigabytes of junk files that don't belong in any Backup.

You need to thoroughly study backup theories and techniques before setting up your own backup scheme.

Just a thought,
Shadow :cool

 

For years, I've been advocating that, "The very best backup, is the one that's NOT on your computer".
There's DVD's, External HD's and Flash Drives. I use all of those.

Several times I've seen a power supply go ballistic and wipe out every circuit in the computer, blowing the tops off of IC-Chips on the mobo and even the hard drives. You might call that a "Catastrophic Failure".
Or even worse, your house burns down and your computer is reduced to a smoldering heap of metal and plastic.

Since 1997, I've been using Ghost, even before Symantec bought it. But alas, they don't have any FREE versions currently available.

Not so with Acronis. If you have either a Seagate or Maxtor HD, then you can truly run Acronis True Image for free.
It comes for FREE in Seagate's 'Seagate Disk Wizard" and in Maxtor's "Max Blast" software, downloadable from their web sites. I have both and the Acronis TI is identical in both, and it will indeed back up Vista.

If a person will just open their eyes and look around, some of the worlds best software can be had for FREE.

As for computer security software, like AVG and Spybot S&D, it's ALL FREE.

So there's NO reason that anyone should ever have to mortgage the farm to buy software.

Using Ghost or Acronis, I make several backups every week, to different media, but at least twice monthly, I back up my C: drive to a DVD and take it 20 miles away and put that disk in a fireproof vault.
My house can burn down or a tornado can blow it away and my data is still safe.

That's right.... I get my entire C: drive backed up, with compression, to a single DVD. That doesn't happen by accident. It requires a bit of concerted effort, to keep my C: drive just that clean.

From my Ghost boot disk, I run a series of Batch Files to remove every last junk file from my HD (at least the ones that I know about) before I ever run the backup program itself.
Just the Pagefile.sys file itself is nearly four gigabytes. Then there's all those old Restore Points, that become redundant if you're backing up the whole C: drive. And, if you're using "Hibernate" on your PC, you have that huge "Hiberfil.sys" file to deal with.
Well, the list of junk files just goes on and on, but maybe you can begin to see what I'm getting at. Why back up junk?

I'm sorry this post ran so long, but this is definitely NOT a subject that can be reduced to a simple one-liner.

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow :cool

 

Thank you all for the great info. However, most of this is over my head...
I will be hones here. I did the trial version of Carbonite....let it run out thinking I could get a good backup software from Major Geeks.com.
When using Carbonite, I don't recall making any technical decisions? I just knew my system was beeing backed up.
I guess for dummies like me, I should stick with something easy (carbonite) and bite the bullit.....pay the $50.
I do have a son that will surely understand all the details you've shared with me, maybe he can set something up on my computer for this issue.

Any comments on Carbonite you want to share??
Thanks