For the last six months my computer has been running extremely slow. I decided to wipe the thing clean and start over. I ran the backup and started the reformat. After a gruelling 6 hours, I had it ready to go. I installed about half of the software and then restored the backup. After thumbing through everything, I realized that half of my files were gone!
About a month ago I began creating incremental backups to save time. The first time you do an incremental backup, it will create a copy of all files. The second time you do an incremental backup, it creates a copy of only the changed files. I created a scheduled backup so that each night at 3am, my computer would do an incremental backup.
What Microsoft doesn’t tell you, is that it stores each backup in the same file. So, when you go to restore your backup, it shows you a list of each day, allowing you to tell yourself, “I know I accidentally deleted the file on Wednesday but I want to get the file from Monday because I didn’t like the changes that were made on Tuesday.”
This sounds like a cool deal… and it actually is. But, what they don’t tell you is that after the 40th backup, it starts deleting the oldest backup. That means that the original backup was gone!
I’ve been keeping pictures on my computer since high school, a journal since high school, and documented/took phots of my completely remodeled my house.
The moral of the story is… backup your files, twice.
I was upset about this – that was a big part of my life deleted too. : /
Ouch … moral of the story, dont rely on Microsoft Windows! I think thats a fair assessment…
So what are you going to do now? Do a full backup once a month, then incremental every other day?
I don’t know what I’ll do now. I have limited disk space so I can’t keep 10 full backups.
The neat thing about incremental backups is that they’re small and you can have 20 days worth of backups. If you create 10 full backups it’s huge.
I think the best way to do it is have a one full backup every other week and incremental backups each day.
I really like that MSFT has a built in backup utility… I hate installing software. So, I always use things that are built-in (ie, notepad, etc.)
I’d suggest having a hard drive soley for backing up important things – external from your main drive. Or just don’t keep sentimental things, that works too.
Yep seperate hard drive for backups would be nice.
My setup is fairly stable. I have a second internal hard-drive which I store all my documents, etc. Windows and application installs are all on the first hard-drive. When I need to re-format (which I like to do often), I just wipe the first one … and all my documents, etc are safe on the second.
Also, the speed in which I am up and going again is pretty fast. I also store all my commonly used program setup files on the second hard-drive. So I can install just about everything I use in a few minutes.
The second hard-drive could fail at some point. So I should probably be making a backup on a regular basis…