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Is This A Risky Backup Strategy?

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The data drive that I wish to back up is currently at 182GB / 40,000 Files.
 
My current strategy is a once a week backup (incremental) to a second internal drive with a once a month copy of the backup to an external drive.
 
The initial file created in excess of 150GB and for that reason I am getting rather paranoid about what might happen if that file becomes corrupted.
 
Is it a bad strategy to back an entire drive to one TIB file? If a few bites of a TIB file become corrupted does that render the whole backup useless or just the portion where the corruption is?
 
Am I better off setting up multiple smaller backups such as Documents, Music  and Pictures etc? Does this lover my risk of losing all the data because only one part of my data is at risk in each TIB?
 
Clearly I would prefer to just backup the whole drive in one go but I thought I would get expert advice from you guys before deciding how to continue.
 
Thanks
 
Peter
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We use a synchronising program such as Microsoft’s SyncToy, Karen’s Replicator (both free) or there are a number of such programs you have to pay for a Google search will give many hits.

These have the advantage that the files remain in their native format and are not compressed, in any event files that are already compressed such as jpg’s will not be compressed again to any significant amount by TI and may slow the making of the TI image down.
 

Whats with the formating? at the top of my post not in original comment box!!
 

Hello,

Como, I've fixed this post. Could you please clarify what Internet browser you are using?

Thanks,

Michael wrote:

Hello,

Como, I've fixed this post. Could you please clarify what Internet browser you are using?

Thanks,

Thanks Michael the browser is Firefox 3.5.2 which I believe is the lastest version

Michael:

Como's reply #3 above illustrates another bug in the forum software. If you reply to a post by using the "Quote" button, a copy of the previous poster's comments is included as a quote. If you add your own comments and then hit "Preview", a second copy of the previous poster's comments are added. You end up with two sets of quoted comments in your reply.

K0LO wrote:

If you add your own comments and then hit "Preview", a second copy of the previous poster's comments are added. You end up with two sets of quoted comments in your reply.

I've noticed that too. I've just deleted the "new" quoted copy. However, it would be nice to have it fixed. By the way, it does this on every preview. If you preview it three times, you get three copies.

To save any confusion, following Kolo's and MudCrab's comments in posts 4 and 5 above I have deleted the extra quoted copy from my post 3.

The sooner the bugs are sorted the better, does this show a lack of testing again?

Any chance a Mod can delete the last five posts or this thread so I can re-post it? It seems to now be wildly off topic!

Sorry, Peter.

Back to your original question -- most of us would advise that you only use TrueImage for its core function of creating full images of the operating system partition. Your data is the most valuable and sometimes irreplaceable item on your PC, so keeping it safe should be a top priority.

As others have posted, you would be better off creating a separate partition for your user data, and using programs like Karen's Replicator or Microsoft SyncToy, or similar to periodically copy your data files to external storage media. Use ATI to create images of your operating system partition to save you the time and hassle of reinstalling everything from scratch if a disk fails or other problems arise.

While you can use ATI for your data by imaging the data partition, you get a single large proprietary file containing all of your valuable data. If anything goes wrong with this single file you won't be able to access it to recover data. Conversely, if you back up your data in its native format and something goes wrong, you may lose a file or two but you won't lose the whole nine yards.