Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler good software for PC auto backup?

I have a baseline backup that I know is clean that I can go back to any time. It includes the basic software I will always want.

The nice thing about a bare metal restore like this is that you don't need to worry about reinstalling driver updates and the like. It is much simpler than a complete re-install of your sytem.

If you haven't already purchased the second 500 GB hard drive, I have a Seagate Freeagent Pro external hard drive which comes with an auto backup feature that immediately backs up your hard drive as soon as anything new is created; it's really slick.

Yeah, I already got it. I really wasn't in the market for one but found the 500 gb western digital my passport for $93 and couldn't resist. I already had one which is used for music (and some tv shows)...

I am running richcopy right now and backing up my pictures on my pc and my music from my external drive right now... couldn't figure out a way to set a scheduled backup with richcopy yet (if it is even possible), but in reality I can just run it once a week or so and it should be fine.

I may try Acronis... and still haven't been able to get the windows task scheduler to work. I use to have spybot search and destroy to auto updates and then a scan every night but that isn't working now either. I changed my computer name and user name a while back and task scheduler hasn't ran since, and any new attempt to set something up with it gives either doesn't work or gives me an access/permission error.

oh well, window task scheduler sucks anyway. (sour grapes!)

Try using newmachinename\newusername in the tasks, along with the new password. That's probably what happened.

Reread my post and realized I left out the most important part.

I went through this a while ago and if you are not looking for an instant PC rebuild option and just want to backup data, this is what I ended up going with after trying many, many options. I was willing to buy something but ironically, this freeware tool had everything I needed. Usually, freeware sacrifices something for it's convenient pricing.

AceBackup

It is freeware but seems to have every feature found in commercial models. At least all the stuff I needed and then some.
- Full or incrimental backups
- compression or 'as is'
- maintains the directory structure
- multiple file versions, if desired.
- a Scheduler
- Encryption or not
- options to backup via FTP, DVD or CD


I'm probably forgetting some key features but there is probably a better list on the web sight. Easy to use and very reliable so far.

Very nice package for freeware.

I've had good luck with the free version of SyncBack. I've been using it for years and I really like it.

Do any of these PC Backups also copy over apps? I'm trying to find a backup solution for my PC. If my PC 'dies', I want to reinstall my Windows from scratch and the restore my entire environment.

Now that I think about it, I'm looking more for a ghosting package.

Tom, thanks for the SyncBack link, started using it last night, great program! Do you just backup your profile folders for each user?

Yeah, basically, that's how it started. Now, I just tell everybody in my house that they have to store their crap on a virtual server I set up for that purpose. I'm mostly just concerned about pictures, music and documents, and the first two of those absolutely have to be centralized anyway. It's a good program for not only the automated stuff, but also to do project-based data moves.