[geeks] windows backup software

[Cory Smelosky]

On 22 Mar 2013, at 13:16, "Phil Stracchino" <alaric at metrocast.net> wrote:

>
> 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.

Wow.  I can copy 320G over IDE over Fast Ethernet faster than that!

>
>
> 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
>  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
>  Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, SQL wrangler, Free Stater
>                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.
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