NO Excuse for NOT taking backups (Laptop done in 8 mins)

lagunasrfr said:

I use Macrium. Image full backup once a month-200gb. I run incrementals daily. Both run unattended from Task Scheduler. Recently updated to 512gb I7 SSD laptop. Now full backup takes 40 min vs 2 hours with old laptop. Incrementals take from 15 to 90 seconds vs 15 to 30 minutes. Have 5tb external as backup media.

Personally, I keep data on a separate drive, so it keeps OS image lean and mean, and backup valuable data to onedrive. I do not bother backing up my videos partition regularly (80% of my data) as that is non critical to me. I do back it up every three months or so to an external drive. I can always redownload stuff pretty quickly anyway.

By keeping data from OS, it speeds image backup by order of magnitude, plus if the restore did fail, I can do a clean install without losing data.

I keep my data on separate data partitions over a number of drives, the only data on the System SSD drive is my adobe lightroom catalogue as it speeds things up when processing, the actual images are on a 1TB Images partition on another drive. All my standard user folders are redirected to a general Data drive both System and data are backed up weekly.

I also have a few drives attached to my main router and these contain Mirrors of the data partitions so that provides some redundancy, I have to look at an unlimited cheap UK based online backup option to complete the set-up

"...By keeping data from OS, it speeds image backup by order of magnitude, plus if the restore did fail, I can do a clean install without losing data..." -- cereberus. Words of gold on a silver platter! That is exactly what and why I do as cereberus does.

I cheat because I don't have a lot to backup.

I back up from ssd to a Hot Swap (Sata connection) ssd.

Pop the ssd into a Hot Swap bay and make your Backup/Clone and your done quickly. Take the Hot Swap ssd out and store it.

I would suggest looking into Hot Swap bays for hard drives and or ssd's. It does make life easier.
That is one reason I always look for cases (towers) that have 5 1/4 front bays.

Jack

lagunasrfr said:

I have over 1/2 of my SSD free. Since it is much faster than my External Drive, I keep data I work with on the SSD. Also, if I kept photos, music, some important data on my external drive, I would have lose some of the portability of my laptop. Would be difficult to work on data on external drive at Starbucks. lol

If the laptop has a dvd drive you rarely use, a neat thing to do is to remove it and put it in external usb caddy, then install a hard drive in dvd space using a dvd to hdd caddy.