Re: The "right thing"....was: Re: Are you considering an Apple Mac/iMac? ...



On Fri, 18 Jan 2008, DK wrote:

In article <Pine.NEB.4.64.0801170817030.7375@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Straydog <asd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Any time I don't like anything, it takes 5' to restore and go
back to a clean perfectly working state.

So, are you saying you are restoring, what, some 2 gigs of files in 5
minutes?

Exactly. And I don't even have fastest and newest hard drives,
just decent IDE ATA133.

Well, OK.

Download them from buggy updates or a hacked windows site?

Even if Windoze update creates a problem (hasn't yet
happened for me), I always have an option of restoring a
disk image before that update and blacklisting that particular
update for all future updates.

Fine.

Now, here is a trick question for you: There are backup softwares out
there that are image-based and those that are file-based. How about you,
who know so much, tell me what are the relative merrits and demerrits of
both categories?

That's like asking what's better, steaks or peaches :-) The obvious
answer is "it depends".

Yeah, I was waiting for you to tell me what (technically) it depends on. What you told me below is just what you do/did. Not why you do it.


===== no change to below, included for reference and context =====

The Acronis TrueImage that I mentioned
includes both and I use both.

Here is my setup at home:
"System" partition is 5 Gb and is being imaged few times
a year or after some major upgrades that I know I'll almost certainly
keep (e.g. video card upgrade). It contains OS and 95% of the
programs I use. The resulting compressed image file is never more
than couple Gb in size, so it takes about 5' to backup/restore.
"Data" partition is >100 Gb with ~ 80 Gb used. Making full
disk image backup of that takes too long and is impractical for my
non-critical use. Every year or so, I make a full image file. Other times,
I have Acronis bug me every two weeks for making an incremental
backup (i.e., writing a file that describes differences between base
disk image file and the current state of the disk/partition). When I
feel like it, I let the backup proceed. That is pretty much 100%
equivalent to what you describe as "file-based". The reason being
is that Acronis allows manual file extraction from any of its backups.
All backups are written to a different physical disk and system
backups and critical personal data are also being copied to DVDs.

At work the machine is on 100% of the time and connected
to a very large file server. As such, I have Acronis scheduled
to do a full password-protected backup of the entire disk (system
and data partitions) every month and incremental backups of it
every two days (starting 2 AM). My personal data (email,
bookmarks, "current work" directory, etc) are also being backed
up to a file incrementally every day to an old and slow HDD, for
which I couldn't find a better use.



DK

.

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