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#51
I wonder whether a USB flash drive is reliable enough for the most important files.
I wonder whether a USB flash drive is reliable enough for the most important files.
Just assuming an average computer user, not an IT or whatever. The average user doesn't have to backup on a daily basis. He can just backup only the everyday files he works with on a USB Flash drive. Many folks know only the basics and they find it difficult to do anything advanced. The last thing they want is to add one more difficulty like taking everyday a backup. Copying your important data to another medium is something most are familiar with.
I consider myself a pretty average user. But as a photographer, I want to be sure anything and everything that changes gets backed up daily. So I have a couple backups that run every night at 1 a.m. and the system, all those goofy unnamed partitions and things I'd need to restore get backed up using EaseUS Todo Backup.
Images get backed up at nightly using Syncback.
Every 14 days, the backup drive gets swapped off-site so I always have the current 14 days of backups, the two weeks prior to that, and usually a weeks set 3 and 6 months old.
I like a little redundancy, and I DON'T like losing images.
Given your data backup requirements, I would suggest you should consider buying the paid version of Macrium Reflect. Reflect is faster than Easeus anyway, but where it is far superior is on restores, as its best feature is Rapid Delta Restore.
Here, Reflect restores pc by difference i.e. it only restores the changes rather than full drive (basically like reverse of incremental backups). So long as you have a recent full image, restoring incrementals or differentials is incredibly fast.
The other thing that is well worth considering is the ability to mount images as a virtual hard drive, so you can mess around trying things with no risk to main installation.
You can download the trial version of Reflect paid version for 30 days with no obligation to try the Rapid Delta Restore.
Use a backup application to take a daily backup of your photos. There is no need to backup the whole computer, you can add specific folders to the backup. That is not what a common user would do, it is a little more advanced. A common user can keep a copy of important data on a USB Flash drive or OneDrive or Google Drive or a removable hard disk (USB). I am not sure if a removable hard disk is more secure than a USB flash drive. It must too be handled carefully and ALWAYS do a safe device removal (from the icon on the taskbar) before disconnecting.
I double-click on a CMD script on the desktop to turn off (i.e. stop the spindle of) my USB HDD via "HDDScan.exe" before disconnecting the HDD.
HDDScan - FREE HDD and SSD Test Diagnostics Software with RAID and USB Flash support
My thinking is - 2 different purposes. I use a backup software like Todo Backup because it'll do a system image I can restore in the event of some egregious stupid human trick.Use a backup application to take a daily backup of your photos. There is no need to backup the whole computer, you can add specific folders to the backup.
I use Syncback because it maintains keeps the current state of images and derivatives - current. It only backs up what's new and changed.
I skipped several pieces 'cause I figured they weren't important but........
The images, catalogs and incoming partitions, all associated with image processing, are managed through Syncback.
The O/S, both in the form of a system image and a "normal" partition backup with the unnamed partitions, along with all NON-image data are managed in Todo Backup using daily full/incremental weekly backups.
Concurrently with everything else, Syncback goes out to the domestic associate's laptop and grabs all HER data, images, and whatever else she puts into the folder tree that gets backed up. AND the whole "User" folder tree that contains her context.
In the desktop is a 8TB HDD in a caddyless carrier. Has room for 3+ weeks of everything...
Every TWO weeks I swap the HDD off-site.
It's not just images - it's ebooks, music, anything and everything else on the system that changes on a daily basis. EVERYBODY gets backed up at night. On a normal day it's usually less than 50GB, so it's NOT a big deal, and it happens at 1 a.m.
Images and incoming data are stored on a 4TB SSD (when it gets full I'll get an 8 TB SSD), in the desktop in a caddyless removable drive so I can remove the SSD for events and travel.
It's a simple system, requires very little management, and has been bulletproof for the last dozen years.