Looking for a File Backup scheme that is simple
First of all thanks to everyone for giving me such good information this past week while I struggled to set up a rotating cloning process via USB. I am using Windows 7.
Now that I have a working clone I want to turn my attention to routine file backups.
I do have an image file of the full internal drive stored on an external drive. But it occurred to me that while it may be useful in providing additional protection in case something goes wrong with my clone rotation plan, on a weekly basis a simple file backup scheme would serve me better than updating the full disk image.
For sure I would like to do a full backup of my libraries. This would cover music, documents, and pictures. Then update each week using differential backups. Then a new full backup.
I am a little confused, however, in how directories work in Windows 7 versus XP. In my XP systems I had only one user to worry about. In my Windows 7 environment I have 3 users to be dealing with.
I would like to sit in the Admin account and once a week do backups for all the libraries and some other folders for all users. Can someone help me figure out the most efficient way of doing this? I don’t want to have to go into each of the three accounts to do this.
So how do I perform a backup for all windows accounts from the admin account?
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/38691
the above will backup everything and everybody.
Personally, I do not do file backups. All my backups are disk image backups using either FULL ONLY; or Full plus Diff; of Full plus Inc.
Examine the link #2 below and look at illustrations 11-Full; 11-Inc; and 11-Diff. Any of these examples will be a backup of all users..
Here is one result of the 11-Diff .
An example of incremental type backups.
Thanks Grover.
Ok I will use the full image backup combined with differential backups.
I saved an initial full image so my next step will be now to start a new full image as the parent of some differential images.
This leads me to another question. If I need to recover data from my Outlook 2003 program, say an email letter, how does one do this? I think I know how to recover files from the image, but in what form do email folders exist in one of these images?
Smoky
Smoky,
I do not have the answer to your question of recovery a single email. Perhaps some of the other MVP volunteers can help.
Outlook stores everything (inc. e-mail) in data files with a .pst suffix, just like Word saves .doc files. To find an old e-mail, I would restore the .pst file (it's usually called outlook.pst) from a back up, but restore it to a different name (like restore.pst or something) so you aren't overwriting your current file. Then, you can just do a "FILE-OPEN" menu command in Outlook to open that data file. When you are done, just re-open your current file.
Thanks hwc. I don't use Outlook so you have helped me to increase my knowledge.
Grover
If you use the email backup facility, you can restore individual emails. To be safe, I would still make sure you have a disk/partition or a file backup of the .PST files.