[geeks] windows backup software

[Phil Stracchino]

On 03/21/13 17:59, Shannon wrote:
> The last few days I have been evaluating a few Windows backup programs.
> 
> I am interested in your experiences in this area.
> 
> I have never really found Windows backup software that I like. They all
> seem to have some serious flaw that annoys me or reduces their
> reliability or performance.
> 
> Its 2013 and I find it amazing how many backup programs are stuck with
> 80s level interfaces, no support for multiple cores, poor use of
> available memory, and poor backup retention and consolidation features.
> 
> 
> My experiences so far:
> 
> Windows Backup:
> 
> Its free, and it works. But there are cons:
> 
> 	- slow
> 	- horrible and nearly non-existant user interface
> 	- inflexible
> 	- no support for any kind of periodic retention of backups

Also, crippled-by-design in Home versions.

> Acronis True Image 2013:
> Cons
> 
> It doesn't understand concepts like keeping weekly, monthly, yearly
> backups... instead it makes you work out the math with its backup
> management settings. Slight errors result in losing your milestone
> backups (saved weekly, monthly, yearlies), or getting too many of them.
> Its doable, but sofware should work that out for you or be easier to do
> in the UI.
> 
> Consolidation is a nightmare, horribly slow and non-intuitive. Its bad
> to the point where just making full backups uses less space and runs faster.
> 
> It sometimes has inexplicable general performance issues even on high
> end hardware. This includes even the UI's operation, and the effect of
> backups on a running system.

I just finished up a trial of True Image.  In image mode, it's nice and
fast and seemed reliable.  File mode backup was horrendous...  it
estimated five days for a file-mode backup of a machine with mirrored
320GB disks.


I've been working for a long time with Bacula.  There is no client GUI
to speak of, it's network-centric and server-based.  It's usually
reliable on Windows once properly configured, but getting a working
configuration for Win7/8/Vista is a daunting task, and it cannot back up
registry hives except with the assistance ot NTBackup as a client-side
helper, and NTBackup will not reliably back up *open* registry hives
even with VSS enabled.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
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  Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, SQL wrangler, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.