How often to do image backup?
What are your recommendations as to the frequency of Windows/Program partition image backups?
Do you do them on a regular basis, or simply take a new image after every new application install?
How oftenyo back up depends on how much you can afford to lose. If you can afford to lose a week's data, then once a week is fine. If you can't afford to lose more than a day's data, then you need to back up once a day, etc.
Hard drives are terribly cheap; disk space has never been cheaper and I'd recommend backing up as often as you need to and buying enough disk space to keep the backups you need.
I'd never have only one backup for anything critical; if one byte in that file gets corrupted for any reason, you'd be totally screwed when you tried to restore.
I'm not talking about data backup here - there's no question that that is done no less frequently than daily (I have been using online backup for this for years). What I'm asking about is taking an image of the system files.
I had the situation with my XP machine last year that it was slowing grinding to a halt, and the only option seemed to be a complete re-install - several days of work (prior to using Acronis ...). I suppose my real question is, if you take regular image snapshots are you also copying over the 'problems' that are accumulating. It seems to be a balance of making sure you have all your system/applications covered and ensuring that you are only taking an image of a 'clean' system. I suppose I am not sure how to make this judgement.
Absolutely, if your disk is messed up, then when you copy an image of it (backup or clone), that image copy will have all the muck in it.
This is one reason for keeping a series of backups going back in time, including at least one that you are absolutely sure is good (say, the original disk image).
To conserve disk space, some folks backup their documents separately from, e.g., pics and mp3s, and sytem files.
After doing this for many years, I've come to the following philosophy. Create a full image of the system on the last day of the month and then one incremental image per week during the month. Accumulate a number of these images on a backup drive and periodically prune it back as follows:
1. Keep one full image from each of the last 3 months, and...
2. For the current year, keep one full image from each quarter, and...
3. Keep one full image from each year.
4. Add to the list any special images from a clean install of a new OS, for example
To protect against the worst, keep the backup drive off-site.
Good advice but I would add that diff people have diff needs. E.g., It would be a problem if I lost more than a day's work, so I backup everyday. Some folks need to backup even more often. That's not something everyone needs.
Also, if you make lots of changes to the the system, then having lots of old, really old copies mught not be that valuable -- even if you can restore an old copy, it will be so out of date that it might not be useful. One has to balance that against how long a chain of more recent backups one can afford to keep, which is essentially a question disk space.
For convenience, I'd keep backups on site and a second set (copies) of critical backups off site. The off site backups will rarely if ever get used and more importantly, because they are less convenient, might not be kept as up to date as they should be. But one should keep an off-site copy of any bits one cannot afford to lose.
I should have clarified that my comments above were a backup philosophy for protecting the operating system and its installed programs. Absolutely, data backups are more important and the need for more frequent backups is greater. I do that with methods other than imaging.
What are your recommendations as to the frequency of Windows/Program partition image backups?Do you do them on a regular basis, or simply take a new image after every new application install?
Here is my take on frequency.
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1383642&postcount=13