Well done Victor Tango. It's nice when these challenges work out as we hope - and as they should :ok:.

Lets, hope you don't ever have to call on the backup or restore option. But it's good to know that they are there if needed.

Best wishes,

FOR

Yup - we should all do it more often

It is a Basic Law of the Universe that :-

1. If you backup you will never need it

2. The severity of the crash is in direct relationship to the importance of the data lost

Does anyone have a recommendation on which program to use on a Windows based system? Tried using Paragon, but didn’t find it that user friendly. Prior to that it was Norton 360!
Looking for one easy to use that does full as well as incremental backup, from which you can easily restore individual files as well as whole directories

Thanks,

SimWes,

I use a program called SyncBack from 2BrightSparks. It comes in 3 versions, Free, which is pretty basic; SE ($40), which does what you need; and Pro ($55) which has a lot of server functions.

I find SE easy to use. It has a wizard mode and allows you to set up filters to include or exclude directories or file types.

There is a free 30 day trial of both SE and Pro on their website - nothing to lose by trying it out.

Messy

I've been on a jolly nice 10 day holiday somewhere nice and warm .... :cool:

Back now (although much reduced until I've cleared the loads that piled on my desk)

As I'm not sure what's needed here, I'll summarise a few gems in a nutshell until someone cares to fill me in :

(1) Three copies of anything remotely important you don't want to loose. That's three copies IN ADDITION to your live copy.... NOT two plus live !

(2) Said copies should be on three separate devices, ideally from different manufacturers, and ideally a mix of media (e.g. two HD, one blu-ray). If you want to take things one step further, look into media rotation strategies such as Hanoi or GFS. And no, RAID does NOT count as a backup copy.

(3) For anything really, really, really, really important keep one up-to-date backup copy off-site somewhere safe. And when I say off-site, I mean geographically distant off-site ... not your garden shed, not your garage, not your neighbour's cupboard.... I mean somewhere that takes at least 30 minutes to drive to when there's no traffic ! Remember you should be encrypting your off-site backups anyway... so you can always put a copy in the post to somewhere far far away. :cool:

(4) Repeat after me.... an untested backup is not a backup.... don't forget to do your test restores guys !

(5) Don't backup anything you can re-install.... so don't waste your time backing up or cloning your operating system or your software for example ... you can (and SHOULD) re-install those clean from scratch. Another reason not to waste your time cloning is your backups will complete A LOT quicker...especially if you use diff backups.

Mixture

You mention test restore something I would like to do to make sure the expense of buying the Samsung item and restoring actually works.

My concern is when you restore are the files overwritten ?
Are the files duplicated, which would be unacceptable ?

Look forward to your reply before I attempt it.
Cheers :ok:

Most half-decent backup software should give you the option to either restore to original location or restore to specified location.

You would inherently be restoring a copy of the file, so yes there would be duplication.

But the part I didn't make clear was that if you're running a test restore then all you need to do is to pick a small handful of files of various sizes of various ages from various "random" depths on your system and test restore those.

Although your backup software may well have a "verify after backup" function, its only as good as the data being backed up.

I've seen situations where dodgy controller chips start silently randomly corrupting data on disk, the backup process then backs up these corrupted files, the built-in verification passes because the file checksums match (i.e. the backup software blindly backed up the corrupted file). These situations have been on very expensive business-critical systems... so when you're talking about home computers, with cheaper components, then the risk of corruption increases exponentially.

The only way to avoid falling into such a trap is to insert a human performing test restores into the process. Leaving it all to various automated processes will only lead to confirmation bias.

VT,

My simple-minded way of testing a backup is to choose a few files on my hard drive and rename them, with an appropriate suffix. Here's an example for one file:

Rename 'test.doc' to 'test1.doc'.

Use your backup software to recover the backed-up copy of 'test.doc'. As mixture pointed out, you can usually choose the location for the recovered file. In this case, restore to the original location.

Compare the contents of the recovered 'test.doc' with the renamed original 'test1.doc'. You can either do this by opening both files with the appropriate software package or have the computer compare the two files.

In the case of a '.doc' file, Microsoft Word has an option to compare two files and report on any differences. I expect there are free Windows programs available which do file comparisons.

The technically correct answer, both in terms of reliability (i.e. helping avoid human errors & omissions) would be to get the computer to calculate cryptographic hash of "original" and "backup" versions and compare the hashes either with Mk1 eyeball or text diff.

There are innumerable free pieces of software that can calculate hashes (and indeed OS X, Linux, and versions of Windows with Powershell) can calculate hashes on the command line with built-in tools with no need for third-party software.

For critical sample files, of course, the human could (and should) take a quick peek at the restored version .... but for most instances, you can trust crypto hashes.

(just make sure you choose a decent hash so you avoid collision risks, SHA1 minimum but preferably one of the longer SHAs)

Thanks for your helpful answers chaps.

I will give it a go when I've had a good kip/breakfast etc:ok:

Well I tried.

Problem is its all set up for back-up.
I made a new folder on the desk top labeled 'test backup'.
In the programme there seems to be no provision for restoring.
Tried going to Start/computer and then double click on drive E;.
Still no joy, so I gave up and am reporting in. Cap in hand !

mix - only the pros (like you) or the paranoid old-timers like me have the time and dedication to do proper tried-and-tested multiple on and off-site backup like that.

For Windows the best advice I can give to home users is to get a couple of 3TB external drives and put them (well separated) in a steel cabinet with a bit of fiberglass insulation. Preferably in another room (drill a hole in the wall).

Disk 1 is for standard Windows Backups (and System Image) weekly

Disk 2 is for Totally Essential Files (money and whatnot) that need to be copied every day/hour if they have changed. Best to put them in the same TEF Folder (you can still use subfolders) - XXCopy - XXCOPY, A Versatile File Management Utility --- Boldly Extended Xcopy is free, works very reliably and will verify after copy. Command-line only - RTFM.

Mirrorfolder costs a bit of money - MirrorFolder: A real-time folder synchronization and backup software - but is rock solid.

Dropbox is another alternative if you have the bandwidth (we don't)

This is NOT the system that I use but at least it is a good simple start.

(fyi I have a NAS at home and at work that can talk to each other + on and off-site NAS backup drives for both + ReadyNAS Vault + Dropbox)

Don't forget good-old fc

Mac

:\

PS: Despite your scepticism I think bit-rot is as much (and possibly more) a problem than total data loss. I had to retrieve a very old DOS executable from my archives the other day and it was corrupted (as was a backup copy). Eventually repaired with a disk editor after much swearing, but I think that ZFS, with its emphasis on data integrity is the way to go. I know that right now it still needs a bit of fiddling with parameters to get right, but it is the way to go.)

:suspect:

Bit-rot is an under appreciated problem, which is why I spoke of the importance of tested your backups and hinted at the fact that I had seen a bad case of bit-rot in production caused by a dodgy RAID card which the rotten files were then propagated onto the backups. Not a pretty sight and not one I would wish to see again.

ZFS can be cool if you do it right.

But its not a form of backup. Just like RAID is not a form of backup.

ZFS? That's a very odd way of spelling ReFS :}

My personal backup strategy was tested last year when a leaky boiler dripped onto my home server, frying the power supply, and ruining a USB HDD that was sitting on top :sad: Luckily a change of PSU fixed the server and all the disks inside are fine, but the USB HDD was toast.
At that point I was technically down to two copies of my data: one cached on my laptop (actually incomplete as it has a small SSD so not everything is cached), and one on the other backup HDD. Bit too close for comfort...

VT,

What backup program are you using. Did it come with your disk?

ReFS is just a cheap clone of ZFS, isn't it?

Certainly a good thing to have in future versions of Windows, but not something I'd trust until it's been as well proven as ZFS has. If Sun hadn't made the ZFS license Linux-incompatible, I suspect it would be one of the most widely used filesystems in the world by now.

india four two
That's the point.......the programme on the Samsung is for back-up and doesnt seem to accommodate a restore window/programme/option.

So I go to windows restore programme and cant even read the Samsung in drive E: its there , tells me how much is used and max space available. I want to itemise a few files to test restore to desktop file I called test restore.

Microsoft restore can only read its own backup files. As do most back up progs

VT,

As Avtrician pointed out, you cannot open a backup with a program other than the one that created the backup.

However, it seems highly unlikely that a backup program would not have a "restore" option. Please post the filename of the backup program that you are running and also the specs of the drive you have, plus any other information that you think might be useful.

See my PM.

I have a Samsung laptop with W7 and the HDD failed. I had been backing up with Samsung's proprietry mirror and backup software every couple of weeks to an external 1tb drive.. No problem, I can restore. No way, the rotten software wanted the original drive's hidden partition to work. I have restored most of the lost data from other ways but did lose some recent docs and emails. Lesson? Don't trust any of it. Find the most seemingly paranoid poster in the above posts and do what they suggest. I managed to get something back from the u/s HDD as well, by buying a £6 caddy and looking at it from the new installation.