Advice on where to save Aoemi Backups

clayto said:

I have just installed an update to my AOEMI BACKUPPER program. Before I update my Backups I would appreciate some advice. I see my current Backup, at over 20 GB takes up quite a lot of space on my C Drive. Is there any reason why I should not delete it and just keep the (updated) Backups on my USB Flash Drive and my Bipra USB External Hard Drive? In fact, is a Backup on my C (internal) Drive likely to be of little use anyway? Further, I notice that some of my Backups are listed as Disk Backup and some as System Backup. How do they differ and which is to be preferred.

Point of a backup is to recover from worst case e.g. a drive failure. You should never store backups on same physical drive containing the data. Most say an external hard drive is best but a separate internal drive is ok but of course, there is risk of say fire or electric fault destroying both drives (or theft of pc). Most paranoid also store the external hard drive in a physical separate location. Nowadays with cloud and fast broadband, this is perhaps less of an issue. I store all critical data on cloud, and do regular weekly full backups to internal hard drive. I also do occasional bi-monthly full backups to cloud (pragmatically accepting I may have to reinstall a couple of apps, and go through updates in worst case.

Crucial point is critical data is always backed up.

Simple way to look at it is this:

a. Some rotten thief steals your PC.
What would you do then?

Hint: if you have a disk image of ALL your Windows partitions (and possibly of all other partitions) somewhere safe you can recover- and even get a new PC (assuming it's UEFI like the old one as the easier case) up and running using those images.

b. A hijacker injects ransomware. You can't access your files or your PC.
What would you do if your only backup was on your PC? Everything would then be encrypted.

c. Your disk fails. So you lose your O/S and your backup.
What then?

Where do you think you should put your backup now?

Hello @clayto,

clayto said:

I have just installed an update to my AOEMI BACKUPPER program. Before I update my Backups I would appreciate some advice. I see my current Backup, at over 20 GB takes up quite a lot of space on my C Drive. Is there any reason why I should not delete it and just keep the (updated) Backups on my USB Flash Drive and my Bipra USB External Hard Drive? In fact, is a Backup on my C (internal) Drive likely to be of little use anyway? Further, I notice that some of my Backups are listed as Disk Backup and some as System Backup. How do they differ and which is to be preferred.

I use AOMEI Backupper Standard. The compression works out at about 38-40% of the OS image.

You should NEVER keep ANY images or back-ups on the SAME disk as your OS, because if you have a Disk Failure, EVERYTHING will be LOST!

I would Keep the pre-updated images personally. It is better to have them and NOT need them, than to need them and NOT have them.

It is also a good idea to have your Data Backups in more than ONE place and on DIFFERENT Disks.

I hope this helps.

Hello @clayto,

clayto said:

Thanks everyone for the advice.

You are VERY welcome.

clayto said:

I am glad about the confirmation that I can delete the backup on drive C when I have backed up elsewhere.

You could just Cut & Paste them somewhere else for EXTRA security.

I hope this helps.

Hello @clayto,

clayto said:

My Backup is now on my external USB Hard Drive, and it has been deleted from C, releasing a welcome 20 GB of storage space as I hoped.

Enjoy the extra space.

If you have a HDD and NOT an SSD, you might find some benefit in Defragmenting the C:\ Drive.