PPRuNe Forums - Backups

BNT - We're on the same page here - but I didn't want to go into quite as much detail as you ...

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The short answer to that is: don't let that happen. Put your data in the right place, under your "Profile", and back that up. I'm strongly against backing up the OS, because you may be backing up, then restoring, the problem that brings the system down. I always separate OS from data. I have two computers (desktop and netbook), and replicate my data between them, so a need to reinstall the OS on one is not a disaster.

I think I must agree to disagree with you on this. If I've got an Acronis Disk Image taken prior to a major crash, then I would feel confident in recovering the entire system from the image, either to a totally new disk, or to the crashed disk if I had managed to reformat it without errors. Assuming that the data in my Acronis Disk Image might be somewhat out of date, I would then recover my data (in "My Documents") from my most recent memory stick.

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The problem there is that some applications are ill-behaved, or not "up to speed" on the way it should be done. Older games stored their "save files" under the program directory, but newer ones (e.g. MS FSX, Civ4) put these under "My Documents" as they should. One that keeps coming up in discussions is Microsoft Outlook: if you just let it do its thing, it stores all your mail in a file in a hidden directory, something like %userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook. Again, in the past, I moved that file to "My Documents", so I knew where it was and that it was getting backed up.

In general, my message is "know where your data is, and back it up. If it's in the wrong place, move it, or make copies in the right place."

Methinks that herein lies the problem - most users (and I tend to include myself in this category) do NOT know where all their data is, particularly the "ill-behaved" programmes (and how do you know a programme is ill-behaved before you try and recover its data?)

IMHO Outlook is a good example of an ill-behaved programme - yes, it is possible to relocate it's data files (although not exactly an intuitive process). Furthermore, it bundles all your data into a single (inscrutable) .PST file which can only be opened by Outlook itself. Elegant - Not!

But I do manage to get most of my data into "My Documents", which gets backed up (to memory stick) every night - so at worst I should only lose a few hours work.

My guess is that a lot of users tend to think of "Backup" as it refers to everything they have on a hard disk, whereas it's actually two distinct entities: "System" (which is the OS and the Application Software - which shouldn't change all that often) and "Data" which is the stuff that changes each and every day.