Windows 7 Restore and Backup
Hello,
Just a few quick questions and comments about Acronis versus windows 7 backup and restore functionality. It looks like Windows 7 has a great feature to retrieve old version of your files using something called Windows System Restore. Also Windows 7 has something that looks like you can use to backup your system disk. Ok, so the obvious question, once I get Acronis backup running, should I just disable Windows System Restore? Also, it seems like the use of a backup program to keep versioning information is greatly reduced because of Windows 7 built in backup and restore capabilities. Any thoughts or ideas? Thanks.
Justin:
"Previous Versions" is one of my favorite features of the newer Windows releases. It's very useful to be able to right-click on a file and be able to retrieve yesterday's version or the day before's version or last week's version. If you like this feature then you have to leave System Restore enabled.
Unfortunately, Microsoft crippled Previous Versions in Windows 7. Vista used to create automatic restore points daily unless one was created for another reason (installing or updating software or drivers), therefore you could depend on having Previous Versions of files created every day. On Windows 7 the update interval is a week, which is pretty much useless if you rely on versioning as part of a backup strategy.
However, you can work around this in a couple of ways. First, you can create a scheduled task that will manually create a daily restore point. Or, if you use Microsoft Security Essentials, it will update its malware definitions daily and the update process will result in daily restore points.
On my system with daily restore points I get about 1 - 2 weeks of previous versions per GB of space reserved for system restore on a data partition. These nicely fill in between full image backups that one would normally create less frequently. With 4 GB reserved for system restore that translates to up to 2 months worth of previous versions. For the Windows system partition you won't be so lucky because there are too many changes to log files, etc.
If I can just use the Windows versioning functionality, it seems to me like I would not need to use Acronis nonstop backup? I am really wondering about the combination of Acronis and Windows Versioning/Backup more than the functionality of either one for this particular question, thanks.
Justin
I would think that a problem could be that what happens when a file is accidentally deleted. Would it be correct to assume that you could not get a previous version since the file is no longer there and therefore nothing to pick? That would go for both the Windows Versioning/Backup and the nonstop backup, no?
I would think that a problem could be that what happens when a file is accidentally deleted. Would it be correct to assume that you could not get a previous version since the file is no longer there and therefore nothing to pick? That would go for both the Windows Versioning/Backup and the nonstop backup, no?
Sorry, hit the Save button twice.
Steve:
No. On Windows Vista or Windows 7 if you delete a file then you can still recover its previous versions. If you simply open the previous version of the folder that used to contain the deleted file you can see and recover the file as it existed before deletion.
Good to know. Thank you Mark. I haven't had time to fully explore Win 7 yet but so far I am liking it.