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Arent hourly backups a bit excessive?

kbmb said:
You are kidding right?

First System Restore doesn't let you easily select a file and restore it. As another poster said, it stores it's Restore Points on your system drive. Can you even restore a single file with System Restore? I have never in my life successfully used System Restore for anything useful.

As for having to keep your HDD plugged in, you don't. Time Machine will still keep track of all the changes, then when you choose to plug in the HDD again, it'll back them all up.

The safest backup plan for any system is backups to another disk that is not your main system disk. It's even preferable to have backups go to an external drive, not just another internal drive.

-Kevin
Click to expand...

I thought system restore only backs up "system files," anyway? System Restore has saved me many a time on windows xp - i think that says more about the crapiness of xp than the greatness of system restore. When my volume icon or power icon disappears off the taskbar, or windows starts decided i have to log in even though I have only one account, or windows starts drawing the wrong icons for things, or windows starts blue screening for now apparent reason, i find that system restore often helps. And sometimes not. And if there's a way to use it to restore data files and such, I've never seen it.
 
kbmb said:
You are kidding right?

First System Restore doesn't let you easily select a file and restore it. As another poster said, it stores it's Restore Points on your system drive. Can you even restore a single file with System Restore? I have never in my life successfully used System Restore for anything useful.
-Kevin
Click to expand...

Yes. I soon switched to a drive imaging system that made snapshots to an external drive. Snapshots can be mounted so that individual files may be recovered. Vista has 'previous versions' AKA volume shadow copying for PCs. But that depends on your back-up strategy. Time Machine is a more elegant approach. Set and forget untill you need that one file..... I wonder if (and how) one can do a bare metal restore. Boot from DVD?
 
Its pretty silly not to do hourly snapshots. If you are using a large amount of space then you are prolly using a crappy app that creates giant data files. (With the exception of vmware and/or parallels which should be excluded anyway)
 
GoodWatch said:
Yes. I soon switched to a drive imaging system that made snapshots to an external drive. Snapshots can be mounted so that individual files may be recovered. Vista has 'previous versions' AKA volume shadow copying for PCs. But that depends on your back-up strategy. Time Machine is a more elegant approach. Set and forget untill you need that one file..... I wonder if (and how) one can do a bare metal restore. Boot from DVD?
Click to expand...

Boot from DVD and restore. The TM backups are not bootable. Probably a better idea to disable TM for entourage DB and VM, use superduper for weekly or bi-weekly image backups (overwriting the target each time), and then, in the event of catastrophe, boot of the superduper image, and restore from TM as time permits.
 
VoodooDaddy said:
Well thats what I thought, but how can this be explained? Before I went to bed I happened to check free space on the new hdd I bought. It had 440.50gb free. I remember that specifically because it was exactly 25gb used on the drive. Its a 500gb drive but usable space was only 465.50gb.

So I check the drive this morning and see it has 439.56 free, so it had effectively used another 1gb for nothing.
Click to expand...


At 30/c a gigabyte does it matter? (assuming a 500gb drive costs $150 USD)
:rolleyes:
 
Father Jack said:
Can you please say why? ... :confused:
Click to expand...

Basically in the event something happens to your machine that causes all internal components to get affected.....like a power surge.

The thought is that the external drive will have a better chance at surviving a surge.

-Kevin
 
kbmb said:
Basically in the event something happens to your machine that causes all internal components to get affected.....like a power surge.

The thought is that the external drive will have a better chance at surviving a surge.

-Kevin
Click to expand...

Yes. There are several rules of thumb to make sure a back-up is effective.

1. Use different media. It has little use making a back-up to another partion of your only internal drive. If that drive fails, you lose everything, including the precious back-up.
2. Physically separate the back-up medium from the data source. Even if you make back-ups to a second internal drive, you are not safe. If something happens to your computer, it may affect the back-up drive as well.
3. Organise a back-up schedule. (Time Machine helps with this).
4. If your data is your living, rotate back-up media. Keep even and uneven media and alternate between saparate locations.
5. Archive to an near line medium. Dump to DVD's and keep those as last resort.
6. DO A REGULAR TEST RESTORE! Making back-ups is one thing, making sure they can be restored is another thing.

In my case, Time Machine will suffice. I make regular DVD copies of my data (docs, pictures, etc.). Professionally we took measures that go too far to use in a private setting but our data is very valuable, a whole company depends on it. (Two vaults on different locations, eleborate back-up schedules and tapes that 'travel' between different sites).
 
kbmb said:
You are kidding right?

First System Restore doesn't let you easily select a file and restore it. As another poster said, it stores it's Restore Points on your system drive. Can you even restore a single file with System Restore? I have never in my life successfully used System Restore for anything useful.

As for having to keep your HDD plugged in, you don't. Time Machine will still keep track of all the changes, then when you choose to plug in the HDD again, it'll back them all up.

The safest backup plan for any system is backups to another disk that is not your main system disk. It's even preferable to have backups go to an external drive, not just another internal drive.

-Kevin
Click to expand...

Yeah, System Restore in XP was used to allow user to roll-back in case a user installed a driver or application that messed up the Windows system. It is not a backup utility. Maybe the poster meant the "Previous Version" that is available in Vista (Ultimiate and Business, I think). This allow you to restore a file from a different point in time. From what I read, "Previous Version" does not make multiple copy of the file but just keep track of that changes to the file.

And I agree about backup on another device. You want to be able to have it seperate, in case of a hardware failure and not just an accidental deletion.
 
MrMoore said:
Yeah, System Restore in XP was used to allow user to roll-back in case a user installed a driver or application that messed up the Windows system. It is not a backup utility. Maybe the poster meant the "Previous Version" that is available in Vista (Ultimiate and Business, I think). This allow you to restore a file from a different point in time. From what I read, "Previous Version" does not make multiple copy of the file but just keep track of that changes to the file.

And I agree about backup on another device. You want to be able to have it seperate, in case of a hardware failure and not just an accidental deletion.
Click to expand...

It tracks the differences in delta files but you can restore the individual files. The system in similar to that of volume shadow copying. Our users can thus restore their files themselves, they are backed-up in 4 hour intevals, on a network it works with Windows XP as well but only on network files, not local ones. We soon will deploy dedicated storage appliances where hourly snapshots are made. All is better than regular back-up every 24 hours.
 
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