Home PC Backup Software - ?

[Dennis Peacock]

Before you suggest it....I am not funding online backups as I have WAY too much stuff to backup off my computer. I've been using Acronis backup software for about 3 years and they are falling way out of favor in support and their new product has a LOT of bugs and many of the features that it had in the 2012 release are now gone in the 2015 release of the software. I'm looking to see what any of you are using to backup your PC with and I am backing up to USB attached disk (if that matters any).

[Mike Lassiter]

Dennis, I have been using a Windows Home Server from HP for several years now and mostly pleased with it. It is connected by Ethernet my computer in our bedroom and wireless to the one I use in our shop on the other side of our driveway parking area by our house. It does automatic backups daily of all computers that you setup in it. Dual hard drives with 2 empty bays for 2 more.
It has been really useful to me as I work sometime on the bedroom computer then to the shop where the laser and other stuff is and I was having to use a zipdrive to take files from the house to the shop, then inevitably I would alter them on that computer so now I had 2 different files. The home server really helped for that as now I save everything on it and work with the same file from either computer. When I got the server it was around $500 I think with 1 TB of space on 2 drives. I have it set to be redundant with files copied to each driver so there is sort of a double backup of everything. It's not infallible though as I was getting a error message saying there were file conflicts. Everything seemed to be working ok, but ran a utility to resolve the file conflicts which then erased all files from the previous desktop I had in my bedroom that died. It had several years of emails that I wanted to keep (why I left that computer's files on the backups done on the server) so now those are gone, but it was more of want to keep than have to keep.

I understand though HP no longer sells them, but Microsoft still sells the software I think and no longer supports the version I have.

[Myk Rian]

I understand though HP no longer sells them, but Microsoft still sells the software I think and no longer supports the version I have.

Then why suggest it?

I use Backup Maker. The free version works well enough, and will do an incremental backup. I have a 3tb USB drive to store the backups on.

[Bill Huber]

There are a bunch of stuff out there and I have found the one I like best before I when to Carbonite was one called Second Copy.
It is cheap, $30 and it does it all and is easy to use. http://www.secondcopy.com/

You can backup to anything, FTP, USB Drive, shared drive, network drive. You can set it to delete files or you can keep a number of copies of the deleted file.

I still use it on the wife's PC, I have a shared drive on my main PC and Second Copy backs her PC up to the shared drive and then Carbonite backs up that drive to the cloud.

[Mike Lassiter]

Then why suggest it?

I use Backup Maker. The free version works well enough, and will do an incremental backup. I have a 3tb USB drive to store the backups on.

Perhaps you need to read it again. The software is still available the Microsoft Home Server hardware is not - at least from HP.

[Robert LaPlaca]

I use a Network Attached Storage (NAS) unit from Seagate as the target for the PC file backups, the drive I have is 2TB, I think Seagate has them as large as 4 TB.. As much as I am not a fan of Windows 8, the Windows 8.x file history feature is what I use as the backup software for files on the PC..

[Brian Elfert]

I am using Acronis True Image Premium 2014 and it seems to work just fine for me. I have not upgraded to the 2015 version. (I never used True Image before the 2014 version.)

I pay the $50 a year for the Acronis Cloud option. I back up to an external drive first and then 60 minutes later I back up to the Acronis Cloud. The cloud is nice because I can get at my files anywhere. I have less than 80 GB on my PC and don't add too much so the cloud works for me. For a lot of people I can understand why the cloud doesn't work. I use the cloud because I will still have my files in case of fire, theft, or or natural disaster where I lose the laptop and the external drive.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

For large backups, I know at one point Amazon s3 offered a "mail in your drive" option, FWIW. I had a photographer friend who used it because he had a ridiculous amount of data that he wanted stored offsite, as that was his livelihood. I assume it's still available, but I know nothing about it.

[John Coloccia]

I use Acronis software, but not that crappy consumer one. There's a business one that's much better and doesn't have all the craziness they introduced in the 2015 version of the consumer software.

I backup to a Synology RAID, setup to mirror. It's stuffed with two, 4TB drives. I'm using the old 750GB drives that came out of my old backup server (Linux box with a RAID, set to mirror), and a SATA docking station for my offsite stuff.

I probably have about $1000 into it, total, but a large chunk of that is the Synology RAID. I need this because it backs up my entire business on an aggressive schedule, plus my home computers. If you just have a handful of computers, you can simply get a SATA dock and some hard drives, and backup like that. How often do you need to backup? How much data?

I agree with you that cloud backup solutions are for the birds. They sound good in theory, but just give a read through the myriad horror stories when people actually have to use the backup to get running again after a computer bricks. No such problems with real backup hardware and software.

[Bert Kemp]

You say don't suggest it but any back up you do yourself in house is subject to loss. Fire, Flood drive failures. I mean why do you want to back up in the first place? Your afraid your computer will crash, house will burn, flood, tornado, theft. I feel for 5 bucks a month and unlimited backup of my computer its a no brainer, I never have to worry about my files. I never have to remember to do the back up and I get a discount each year if I renew early they give me 3 months free so I get 15 months for 59.99 which is 4 bucks a month, just sayin, oh sorry I mentioned it

[Curt Harms]

When I was using Windows as my primary O.S., I used syncback to synchronize directories. Today I use rsync with a GUI frontend. Macrium reflect seems to get pretty good reviews as well. As far as using an online backup, I'd use that for files like pictures and videos that if a copy wound up in the old Soviet bloc or China it'd be no big deal. For financial or medical records that would be an identity thief's dream, no thanks to the 'cloud' for me. Bank safe deposit boxes aren't that expensive, you just have to be disciplined enough to keep those backups current.

[roger wiegand]

Crashplan has been very good for me. I back up all the computers in the house to a NAS as well as to their cloud service, then also back up the NAS to the cloud service. Even better, I have successfully restored computers from both the NAS and cloud. You can back up between any two computers connected on the internet. With the "family plan" any amount of data and number of computers is covered. I only back up about 2 Tb of data, and the remote download of that much does take a while, but it's really nice to have the assurance of off site storage. The first cloud backup does indeed take a few weeks, but it happens in the background and a user would never notice it. If you're keeping big data, backup becomes a thorny issue, and is generally solved only with fat pipes and lots of money. At intermediate levels, like a petabyte or two tape can still keep up, but once you get to large amounts of data it gets very hard. Most home users though don't have more than a few terabytes, for which Crashplan is good (and relatively cheap) for the cloud and great for local backup either to NAS or another computer.

[Dennis Peacock]

I'm looking at about 0.5 TB of data to backup and I don't want to use "cloud" storage. Way too much money for me.
I'm a data protection and disaster recovery engineer where I work, so data protection is not new to me but I can't afford the tools we use at work.
At last count, at work, I'm supporting just over 60 PB of data per month.

I'm just needing an inexpensive solution for home stuff...nothing more. I don't mind Acronis 2012, which is what I have now....I was going to upgrade until I found all the horror stories about Acronis 2015.

[Grant Wilkinson]

I gave up on Acronis last year and went with Novastor. It's been solid and on the rare occasion that I have had a question, I have had a reply from tech support within hours.

[Dennis Peacock]

I gave up on Acronis last year and went with Novastor. It's been solid and on the rare occasion that I have had a question, I have had a reply from tech support within hours.

Grant,
NovaStor is one that I've been looking at. If not now, I'll decide later this year.

Thanks everyone for your input. Much appreciated.!!!