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simple backup

G

GunsMadeAmericaFree

Golden Member
Back in the day (around 2000, probably) I remember installing a program called Simple Backup

http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/storage/sony-dru-500a/backup-s.jpg

It was originally from Veritas Software. Never before or since have I found any backup software so easy to use. I just ran it from the desktop, and it was able to back up my entire hard drive and windows setup onto 3-5 compressed, bootable CD's.

If I had a problem or decided to wipe my drive for any reason, I could simply stick in the first CD, reboot, and then recover in about 30 minutes. All I had to do was insert the next CD in the sequence. Once Windows was reinstalled, I would reboot and be back to the desktop.

There was no interface to learn or really anything that I needed to do other than starting the backup. In this way, it really was a simple backup, and it seemed to get everything - I never found any files missing, even when I swapped a hard drive.

Is there anything out there that would have an extremely simple interface and do the same today? Of course, doing it to DVD's and maybe USB would be better than CD's in this day and age. The couple of things I've tried so far had dozens if not hundreds of choices and such - not very simple.

Veritas is gone, but I'm still hoping to find a SIMPLE backup program.
 
Sounds like you are referring to backing up Windows as opposed to personal data.

Simplest interface I've seen is Macrium Reflect Free Edition. Straighforward, maybe 6 or 8 mouse clicks.

I'd never even consider backing up Windows to a series of DVDs--I've read too many horror stories about disappointment when it came time to actually restore when in a jam.

I'm not even positive Macrium can back up to DVDs. At any rate, at less than 5 GB per DVD, it would take a bunch of them to back up the typical installation--leaving aside the reliability and disk management issues.
 
Macrium can create backups on DVDs, and does have the option to create a restore DVD or bootable flash drive to boot the system for restoration.

However, I don't know why you'd want to do that - a system backup would take forever (with you having to sit there swapping discs), and your backup media will start degrading as soon as you burn it unless you have a DVD burner that supports and you use M-Disc media.

Better off to pick up a cheap USB3.0 hard drive (or even a pair of drives to alternate for data safety) to do backups on.

If you insist on burning backups to DVDs, the best of this poor alternative would be to buy a blu-ray burner that supports M-Disc and get some M-Disc bluray media (they have released a single layer M-Disc bluray media recently). It is pretty expensive, but you can at least back up 25GB per disc and the discs won't degrade until long after you are too dead to care.
 
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I use Acronis True Image to make a full image of my system drive every night (actually 3 of them, an individual image across 3 different drives.) Restarting your system after a crash is as simple as mounting that image on a target drive and getting on with life... takes about 20-30 minutes.

I do have experience using it as well, last year my SSD died unexpectedly... once I installed a new drive, I mounted the Acronis image and was back in business in 20 minutes.

TI has an option to make a bootable image as well, if that's your flavor. I don't see any reason to back up to CD/DVD when we have portable drives and USB drives available.
 
Full backup is just needed when you need a perfect clone of the drive and for me it was norton ghost.
 
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