Backup Software

[tricky]

Can anyone recommend any good, reliable backup software? It will be used to backup entire drives to an external Firewire800 1TB drive. The drives will be between 60GB and 350GB or so in size, and our intention is to do incremmental backups every month so that only the changed files will be updated.

We have tried the Windows backup utility with mixed success. We have tried a demo of Genie but we had issues with incremental backups taking forever.

The backup will be run on a Windows 2003 Server machine. Often, some of the files will be open (for example large Photoshop files or Max files) so it needs to be able to cope with this.

Any suggestions?

[Syclone1]

Ive been using Acronis True Image and its been working out pretty good, there should be a working demo on their site www.acronis.com to see if it will suit your needs...

-dave

[mdi]

I use this, 10/10 from me

http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbse.html

[Bathyscaph]

For me, after having been royally hosed by an ill-timed hard drive crash a few years back, I like having a backup every day so I do quick backup of important files each night and the more thorough disk image each week.

I use Beyond Compare to make incremental backups on to a compressed drive on a daily basis. It works like a charm for keeping different folders in sync. I backup MyDocuments and all of my important directories. It takes about five minutes each night and is easily doable at 3am when you are bleary-eyed and exhausted from a hard day's work. Actually, this is a great tool for most anyone that needs to move files around or sync up directories and it is a handy backup tool. Because you are just copying files there is never going to be a problem retrieving your files later. Some of the backup tools use proprietary compression schemes, etc. and you can lose large chunks of data if an archive gets corrupted

For thoroughness, I make a separate and complete disk image every week or so using R-DriveImage. It can make incremental images as well and you can load up your images as a virtual drive to retrieve files, etc. You can work while the program is running and I think there is a fully functional trial available.

In any case, Good luck.

[Dynedain]

Retrospect

We use it across our entire network (Mac and PC) and have 2 servers, one backing up to tape and one to Firewire hard drives.

[themaxxer]

we use viceversa 2 in our firm and it works very well.
it's simple and cheap.

http://www.tgrmn.com/

best regards
themaxxer

[Robur]

...This works for me: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

on XP

[tricky]

For me, after having been royally hosed by an ill-timed hard drive crash a few years back, I like having a backup every day so I do quick backup of important files each night and the more thorough disk image each week.

We have a nightly incremental backup which gets taken off site on rotation (this uses the standard windows backup which may well be replaced if I find a suitable solution for our monthlys). Our monthly backup is a longer term backup as a backup of our backup.

We too are paranoid!!

[nvanherpt]

i been using SyncBack from 2BrightSparks for a couple of years now.

http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/syncback-hub.html

[vize]

Try Smartsync, cheap and robust, many many options, command line switches support, ...

http://www.smartsync.com/

[tricky]

Syncback has given me problems with large ammounts of data. Its ok for my mp3 player, but given the problems I have had I don't trust it with Windows server and large hard disks.

[voltron7]

do any of the mentioned apps have problems with XP64?
Thanks, curious cause i'm just upgrading to x64 nad will be setting up a backup system...

Thanks, JR