New
#1
Questions - Backup strategies for a personal home desktop PC
Well I'm cruising along with my three week old inexpensive HP Pavilion desktop. They waste so much metal to encase a couple of innards, a little motherboard, a 1TB drive and a silly low output power supply. The rest is air. Hope these things are mostly getting recycled when they expire. Plenty of room but no amps to expand, but then there aren't any empty sockets on the MB anyway. That's only a little disappointing to me. Would've been nice to put my old 320 gig disk in it. And maybe a sound card. But it runs great and I like 10 too. I also have a new 2TB Seagate slim drive and their Dashboard software for my scheduled backups, plus two 320GB drives in USB enclosures, right now doing nothing but containing old files and an Acronis image of my old machine.
My first order of business was deciding on a backup system. After asking around here, I made a Win10 and a Seagate Image just to see how it works but untested for restoring so far. I also ran a Seagate file backup. So right now I'm making a weekly Macrium image and Seagate image. Yesterday I decided to add a continuous Seagate file backup.
But I haven't weeded out and prioritized all this, which is the reason for my post. I see no reason not to use Windows for its semi-continuous file backup, as frequent as every 10 minutes, although fully continuous with Seagate might feel less intrusive. I don't know the feel of this machine enough yet to tell the difference. Opinions are welcome. Another worry I have about either continuous method is, if I get an infection, I could be backing up corrupt files... couldn't I? And then what of the rest of the folders on the backup drive, are they at risk? The Seagate drive is box stock, I've changed nothing about the file system.
I do like the Macrium program, and after reading many good reports, I'm calling it a keeper. So, what about my routine, I'd like opinions on whether to keep running both Windows and Seagate images weekly. And what of the continuous file backups; Windows or Seagate? And should they be on a separate drive from my images? The thought of testing the backup images makes me cringe, I don't really feel like rebuilding my settings and all if it fails.
I hope I've clearly explained what I'm curious about. Thanks for any input.
Rusty