Backup Partition Image Handling

[jesterb84]

Currently, I have a separate partition on my main hard drive which I use to store all my back up data. I have a secondary hard drive (with the same size as my back up partition) and I would like to have a program create an image of the back up partition and store this image file on my secondary hard drive.

I am aware that there are disk imaging programs but what I am not clear on is how they would deal with files which I have deleted or changed after the backup. Probably the most basic method would be for me to delete the image file on the secondary drive each time and re-create the image from scratch. However, this would take a lot of time and there is a chance that my 1st drive will fail during the image creation process.

Can anyone kindly recommend for me a program (free or commercial) which can create image files and most importantly - modify these image files accordingly (to remove files that have been removed, update files which have been changed, and add files which have been created without the need to create the image from scratch).

Thanks!

 

[mc866]

Acronis True Image will do what you are looking for. It isn't free but it's worth the money. You are able to schedule backups that will run automatically, you can do this so the new backup will over write the old one, so you wouldn't have to worry about going and deleting the old image. For instance I do a few different backups of my C drive, I do one once a week and another every day so I'm covered. Each time the task runs it writes over the old image. As far as files changing since the last backup think of the image as a 1:1 snapshot of exactly how your drive is at the point the backup was made. So if changes were made after the image was taken they will not be reflected in the old image, that's why scheduling tasks is so handy. Acronis also allows you to backup your other data, mount images as drives to go back and restore files, and allows you to create bootable USB media.

Edit: Also you have two options for your image, you can do a full backup each time, which copies a 1:1 image of the entire drive, or you can do incremental which will keep a base image and as data changes the image will be updated. The only issue I found was it was difficult keeping all of the incremental images together so you could restore correctly.

 

[jesterb84]

Thanks mc866, I will see if I can get the trial version and give it a spin. The scheduled backup sounds like a good idea (any idea how long to backup 250GB of data?). The concern I had was that these types of programs wouldn't be smart enough to remove deleted files from the image (and thus, the image size grows over time) but from the sound of it, the entire image gets updated when using True Image so that certainly should address the issue.

 

[mc866]

The time it takes all depends on how fast your drive and PC are and how much data you have on the drive you are backing up. I try and run my backups overnight so I don't have to sit and wait for it. I know my c drive is around 80gb right now and I think that takes about 30-45min. Also keep in mind if you do the full backup the image size is roughly the same size of the used data on your drive, so if you have 150GB used on a 250GB drive your image will be about 150GB, hope this makes sense.

 

[13Gigatons]

The image size can be smaller if the files are compressible. Some files like zip, rar, mpg, avi are not really compressible. If you have 250GB of these types of files then you might as well skip compression.

 

[DBissett]

To avoid the hassle of keeping up with many incremental backups do differential backups instead. The incremental backup will backup whatever's changed since the last backup. The differential backup, OTOH, will backup everything that's changed since the initial full image backup. So, if you ever had to restore the drive you would restore the initial full image backup first, and then restore only the most recent differential backup instead of many incremental backups. Apart from the convenience of this the only difference is the time the backups take.....the differential backups take a bit more time than the incremental backups because they are always a bit larger. Acronis lets you select which type you want to schedule. I didn't know, however, that you could over-write the last backup and have been periodically deleting the older differential backups. I'll have to look for that setting.