Need advice for handling a full 4 TB hard drive
I could really use some good advice. I am helping my son (avid gamer so heavy pc user) build a new pc . Here's the problem: He has a 4 TB HDD (we are in Win 10 btw with TI 2020) and it is almost full. He has NOT backed it up before (yes now he is committed to doing this).
I've been using True Image Home for 8 yrs or so now. I regularly backup my 2 PC's to the Cloud w Premium. I just added the space to my account to have enough room to accommodate this 4 tb drive.
I wanted to backup his HDD BEFORE building the new rig. He will use the existing drive in the new rig. Problem: It is taking FOREVER for the backup to occur. After 24 hours, the acronis screen says only 107 GB has backed up and it will take some 2 weeks to complete (which I believe, at this rate!).
We will have to pull the plug on this backup in order to get him up and running again quickly. (He's a college student and has to have his pc working ASAP bc of the software etc. on there.)
I always partition my drives for OS/Programs and then data separate. One reason is to have separate backups. Do you all agree with this? Or for a gamer w high end software (his college program is game design) is it better to leave it all on one monster drive?
Also, if we do partition it ultimately, what is best way to separate the stuff, and how would I go about this, if you assume all the data are in the cloud as one Acronis backup?
Seems to me, and I am no expert, that what I/we need to do is to move data from the orig 4 TB HDD to a separate HDD, then backup, or, just have Acronis backup the folders w the OS and programs to one backup scheme, the data to another, then reformat the 4 TB drive with partitions and bring the data down accordingly.
This all makes me nervous....
Please let me know what you all think....THanks!!!
Be aware that the time to recover 4TB of data from a cloud backup is going to be unacceptable. You might be willing to accept days/weeks/months for a backup to run (unless the source is locked) but probably not for recovery. Given that, it would be worth spending time considering the purpose of the backup - the event you are protecting yourself from.
- Taking regular backups to a local device - possibly much larger than 4TB if you need any kind of archiving - would let you do a relatively quick recovery. Good for recovering from data corruption or device failure.
- Taking regular backups to a NAS on your local network but in a different location protects from data corruption and device failure, physical theft, and possibly environmental threats such as fire and water damage (depending on the location of the NAS). Backup and recovery time will be greater than to an internal drive or a USB-connected drive, but will be much better than to/from the cloud.
Of course, doing the #1 backup and them placing the target drive in a fireproof, waterproof, theft-proof safe would be even better than #2 ... if you happen to have such a safe.
plus the calculations brought up by Steve only if the connection is stable during this time.
Any disconnect or stop of the job e.g. Windows Restart / Windows Update will require a FULL retransmission of the whole backup chunk. Unfortunately there is no "resume" for full cloud backups.
IMHO, I would always look to local backups first. Secondary backups, whether also local (a different external drive, NAS, or cloud) would be a fallback, in the event that the first fails for some reason. No hardware, software, or single backup plan is 100% guaranteed, especially when you need all 3 to work perfectly to keep going and one is going to fail at some point... not if, but when.
I would recommend keeping the OS and basic software to it's own drive. You can have a nice OS setup with the majority of system software (in most cases), easily fit on a 500GB drive with oodles of space. You could even get away with 250GB, but 500GB drives are so cheap, why risk running out of space if you don't have too. By keeping the OS separate from the "data" (installed games, photos, videos, documents), etc., if the OS goes T.U. you only have to restore it and you can do that locally in minutes vs hours, days, weeks, or months.
Then, if you have your data separate, you can also back it up into its own schemes. You don't necessarily have to backup the entire disk or even a partition if it's just data. Instead, you might consider doing smaller backups for each major file type. For me, I do one for family photos/videos, another for my music library, another for my just my user profile and another for my software repository. If I ever need to recover, again, I only need to deal with just that smaller subset of data which makes recover a whole lot faster. And, if you want, you can vary the frequency of backups for each type of data, based on how often it changes, or how often you feel it needs to be backed up.
If time is of the essence... go get an 8TB external USB drive on Amazon for about $140 - I believe Costco has one on sale for $119.99 right now. Take a single disk backup of the 4TB drive "as is" and put it on the 8TB drive - will probably take several hours, but then you've got a backup and can figure out how to restore it later if you want rebuild the PC layout later.