Having worked in IT for far too many years, and having setup, tweaked and maintained various backup systems for employers, I'm ashamed to admit I don't currently have one in place at home for my various computers. I keep 2nd copies of a few important files, but mostly it's down to luck
The other day I switched my main Windows 7 PC on, saw the BIOS screen then was met with rapid beeping but no errors displayed. Investigating, I increasingly suspected the disk had failed, but it turned out that the boot order of the data disk and system disk had swapped. Much relief, but realised I should have a backup system in place. I was lucky this time, but next time?
I added a 2nd disk to my Raspberry Pi file server (always running), configured my laptop with Windows 7 Backup and scheduled weekly backups to the network device. All went well. I was on my way!
I then looked at the couple of occasional-use Windows XP machines, and for the first time ever I ran Windows XP backup. It's obvious that a lot of work went into Windows Backup between XP and 7, because XP backup is abysmal. No scheduling, no incrementals, you just run it to copy stuff.
I then went to my main Windows 7 machine, expecting to have a similar efficient setup as the Windows 7 laptop, but because that PC is running Win7 Home Premium, I can't use Windows Backup to save to a network device
So I then looked at (free) 3rd party software, and tried a few. None that I tried did what I want - which is to do a full backup, then incrementals for a time, then another full, then incrementals etc. I want to be able to recover individual files, or the whole system. (This is what the full function WIndows 7 Backup seems to do)
I didn't find any 3rd party solutions that did this.
So, my question - do you do backups? If so, what software do you recommend?
Ian