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There are isolated problems with current patches, but they are well-known and documented on this site. |
First in a series of life beyond posts about my journey of tech solutions in the post Small Business Server era. For many years I used a product origi
[See the full post at: Patch Lady – Choosing a home backup solution]
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
Have you looked at any of Terabyte’s backup and recovery products? Very versatile and they offer a suite of tools that includes native support for Linux as well as Windows. That includes the ability to selectively restore individual files and folders from full ext 2/3/4 partition backups — something that is unavailable in most others, even those able to include Linux ext partitions in their backup images.
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Acronis has been my default choice for home backups for at least 10 or more years. Each version seems to have a few quirks but overall it gets the job done for 6 or 7 Windows machines in my home from XP Pro SP3 to Win 10 1903.
As an IT Consultant I don’t see desktops and laptops going away anytime soon, especially for the work at home graphic artists, photographers, CPA’s, engineers, and more, people who have real work to do. I’ve seen corporate America try to push handheld devices only but that does not get the job done for all tasks. Have had quite a few gaming towers on my bench in for repair owned by 14 and 15 year olds.
I used Terabyte’s products for a long time, and still do use them for an older XP graphics workstation I have. They’re a little clumsier and non-intuitive for me than Macrium Reflect, but Macrium has a few comprehensibility issues too. But the “Free Factor” weighs heavily in their favor. (Anyone remember Shareware?)
In any case, backups are made weekly (if I have the strength) and are air-gapped, located in three different places. I try and do all the housekeeping before I back up (Disk Cleanup, Defrag, Malware Sweeps, Virus checks). A defragged disk makes for a faster backup, too.
Once a month I verify and test my backups to make sure I’m not living in a fool’s paradise. (Well…more on that later!)
Both outfits are good; Terabyte seems to be less expensive in the paid version.
Both are good. Macrium Support may be better in the paid version.
Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330, Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Greenhorn
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"Nine out of 10 doctors say Acid Reflux is mainly caused by computers."
I’ve been using TeraByte’s drive imaging for a couple of decades. I also use a partitioning scheme to suit my needs and keep my imaging footprint small. Almost all of my routine housekeeping is done via Task Scheduler, as well as my drive imaging.
TeraByte’s drive imaging can handle partitions or complete drives. Periodically I make a complete image set of all the drives in my machine for use for drive replacement when a drive fails. Task Scheduler targets a 2TB drive in my desktop PC, and I use a Robocopy command line to copy those drive images to a 3TB drive in the dock on the top of my NAS. Once the images are copied, I remove the drive for safe-keeping.
I have Image For Windows incorporated into my Windows Recovery Environment via a script that comes with the product. I did a test restore of the B side of my dual boot OS partition earlier today which took 2:55.
I lost two PC’s in a house fire in 2011, but only the hardware. I had the full setup for both in drive images on a couple of HDD’s.
I used “Veeam Agent pro Microsoft Windows FREE”. Trusted company and great product, but you do not have central console for managing more clients – otherwise rock solid.
Now I have Synology NAS and switched to https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/active_backup_business . It has dedup, “smart retention”, central console, Win client/server support, …
I’ve never said “Alexa,” or “Siri,” or “Ok Google”, and I don’t plan to! Same goes for Bixby and Cortana, but that goes without saying. I’d rather type to people if I could (on a keyboard; this does not apply to devices that don’t have an actual keyboard), so I’m certainly not going to voluntarily use voice with computers when I could be typing. And then there’s the whole spying thing…
For backups, I used to use Acronis True Image for a bunch of years. I’ve bought that program many times, but it got to a point where it was too buggy and where the company that made it was more interested in pushing their own cloud services than listening to customer complaints. It began to demand cloud sign-in credentials even when the user had never indicated interest in cloud service or the existence of an Acronis account, and though customers complained quite vocally, the next edition had the same “feature” just the same. It began to pop up ads for Acronis services and specials at random times (not just when actively using the program), while the program itself got buggier.
I tried all of the Windows-based backup programs with a free edition that I could find, and they all work well enough with the basic settings, but most of them fell flat on their face(s) in performance when creating backups with encryption enabled, if there was such an option. Acronis True Image (the paid edition) did not have that issue, but the other issues with True Image prompted me to keep looking.
Aomei Backupper proved to be the speed champion of the Windows backup programs I tried with encryption enabled. Unfortunately, they removed that feature from the free edition, and the program botched a restore attempt (it restored a MBR-formatted hard drive on a BIOS PC as GPT, which rendered it unbootable, and restoring from backup would obviously not work here, as that was what caused the issue in the first place). It was a relatively easy thing to fix, but most people won’t know how to do that, and they shouldn’t ever need to. I reluctantly had to remove Backupper from my recommended list. This issue may have been fixed, but I don’t really know, as I quit using it. If so, it may still be a good choice, as Backupper was fast and had an easy to understand UI when I was using it.
Then there’s the old standby, Macrium Reflect, but it also doesn’t permit encrypted backups with the free edition, and the paid edition is expensive for a home backup program, or I would have gone for it when I was using Windows. $69 per PC (and I have three that I would have wanted to use it on) is several times higher than I ever paid for Acronis True Image, which always is on sale or promo somewhere.
I don’t know how fast Reflect is while performing an encrypted backup, since the free edition didn’t offer that feature, but the program is so solid in general that I would think it would perform well. It’s been really reliable during both backup and restore (I’ve tested the latter quite a lot with various programs). Acronis’ rescue media often (usually) failed to recognize the network share(s) where the backup sets were located, even after I tried all of the tricks suggested in the Acronis knowledge base. It made restoration troublesome at times, though I was always able to get it to work with enough jiggling and poking (which sometimes involved copying the entire backup set from the PC with the share to a USB hard disk and moving that to the PC doing the restore). By contrast, Reflect has done well, without any weird glitches like restoring a MBR backup image as GPT.
Now I use Veeam agent (despite the name, it’s a typical backup program) for Linux, which is free for home users, has encryption and incremental backups enabled, and it’s as fast or faster writing encrypted backup images as Aomei Backupper. Restoring proved quick and reliable, quickly recognizing my network share from the rescue media and restoring from it nicely. On Linux, it runs in the terminal window, but it’s menu-driven, so there’s no need to remember or type any commands. The one caveat is that it only allows using a single “job” (like a backup profile), so you would have to edit that one job’s parameters to do different kinds of backups, which is a silly and really rather pointless restriction. Otherwise, it’s quite solid. If the Windows version is as good, it would be a nice choice.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/16GB & GTX1660ti, KDE Neon
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, KDE Neon (and Win 11 for maintenance)
I use Macrium reflect paid since the beginning of this year when I dumped True Image. I have never regretted this move, it is so much better than Acronis. It is very fast for both imaging and restoring, using Continuous Block Tracker and Rapid Delta Restore. Their support is also great. I had discovered a few bugs since January, and they worked diligently with me to solve it.
I was able to reduce my cost by buying a 4 -pack on Black Friday. Just mark Black Friday in your calendar and look what discount they have (usually on Twitter and Facebook). I bought a Macrium 4-pack with I believe a 40% discount (it might even have been 50%, I do not recall exactly anymore). This way a 4-pack may even be cheap for just 3 computers. Also, when paying if you can change the currency to British pounds and let your credit card company do the conversion, that is also cheaper.
ASRock Beebox J3160 - Win7 Ultimate x64
Asus VivoPC VC62B - Win7 Ultimate x64
Dell Latitude E6430 - Win7 Ultimate x64, Win10 Pro 22H2 x64 (multiboot)
Dell Latitude XT3 - Win7 Ultimate x86
Asus H170 Pro Gaming - Win10 Pro 22H2 x64
I use Symantec System Recovery, Acronis Backup Advanced, and Paragon Hard Disk Manager Advanced. Each has its uses in different situations and each works very well. For example, Acronis allows me to make a whole-disk backup while excluding specified directories or files. This is very convenient when, e.g., a directory is being used for software compilations/builds and is much larger than the rest of the boot drive. Paragon has the best set of partitioning and HD management tools in addition to the backup tools. And so forth…
Does anyone know if Google Drive is susceptible to ransomware encryption? Do I need to be sure to configure it a certain way?
Thanks!
Does anyone know if Google Drive is susceptible to ransomware encryption? Do I need to be sure to configure it a certain way?
That would depend on how susceptible Google’s own servers are to attacks. Locally, it works the same way as the Google Chrome Browser, so if your system gets locked, so does your access to Google Drive from that machine — and that machine only. But if encrypted files are uploaded to Google Drive, they remain encrypted, so all is lost unless you have versioning in place, which by default, Google Drive does not do.
Then there’s the whole problem that Google scans and data-mines everything you put up onto a Google Drive. No protections against that, unless you deliberately encrypt what you are sending up there on your local machine before uploading. Which kinda goes against sharing if you do that, and synching to another device.
BTW, Windows Defender in Windows 10 since version 1803 has had ransomware protection. It’s called Protected Folders, and it is not on by default. If you use any third party security products which have active protections, Windows Defender can’t use Protected Folders, so your third party choice(s) would have to include that protection. You can include or exclude Windows folders as needed with WD Protected Folders. You can also allow specific apps to access protected folders, while leaving the general protections in place. But that can be a pain to manage.
I don’t know the relative quality or strength of WD Protected Folders vs. third party competitors.
-- rc primak
I use Windows backup feature with system image.
Everything goes to external hard drives that I keep in my possession — not a cloud backup. I trade off on the external hard drives. If any hard drive fails, I always have other backups on other hard drives.
If I lose connectivity, I still have my backups and I know how to use them.
(So, call me a Luddite. I have backups, I have backups that work, and I have a plan.)
Over the years, I’ve probably used most of the backup tools mentioned here. However, a few years ago I switched to using Clonezilla. I use it to stream backups over the home net to a general purpose home NAS. I also replicate the backups to other storage for redundancy, but that’s a longer story. Clonezilla supports encryption and I use that feature. Using Clonezilla can be fiddly, but it works great for me and has saved my bacon a few times.
If you decide to play with Clonezilla, use the Ubuntu-based Clonezilla Live version as it (usually) has better hardware compatibility than the Debian flavor.
I use Clonezilla a fair amount too.
There’s just one thing to keep in mind if you start using it as a regular backup tool – it can be a real bother to recover a single file from the disk image, especially if you use default settings and end up with a multipart compressed image.
I read that a lot of people use Acronis True Image. I would like to warn people who are (considering) using True Image. I have used True Image for about 10 years after which I finally dumped it and replaced it by Macrium Reflect Home (the paid version).
Over the years I have had many issues with True Image. In the end I stuck with True Image 2014 awaiting finding a new and good backup and imaging solution. The issues I had were (a.o.):
– Regularly True Image would read and list all the backups present on my connected hard drive(s), even though I had set it not to. Whenever this happened (a.o. always when I had restored an image) it would do this. I would then have to wait for 30-60 minutes before True Image was finished scanning for backups and images. But after that I had then to manually remove all the backups and images that were added to my list. This is a slow and painstaking process which would then also cost me 15-30 minutes. It speaks for itself that this is lost time. And usually it happens at a moment when I did not really have time to deal with it nut was forced to. Do realize that True Image did this even though I had set a setting not to!
– I make monthly file backups and keep them as an archive. This has come in very handy a few times. However, one time I needed a file from this backup, True Image simply refused to read its own backup file. Therefore I was not able to restore the file I needed. Moreover, this was the case on 2 other computers with True Image installed! I always had True Image verify the backup file, so that should not have been the problem. I also keep copies of my backup files and those failed too. In the end there was one computer on which True Image would still read an Acronis backup file. I then restored all my archives on this one computer, so that I still could access all file backups. In the mean time I have made Macrium backups of these. Eventually I want to backup these files using Backup4All, which saves backups as zip files, so that I can restore them without having the backup program installed and never have to solve an issue like this one with True Image again.
– True Image is known for repairing bugs in new versions that have to be bought. So one is forced to pay again if that bug is, well eh, really bugging you.
There were more issues than the ones I mentioned here, but these are the most important ones. If a backup solution is not reliable I do not want to use it. Moreover, I have spent way too much overhead time on solving issues and managing True Image which I could have used much more productively. Ever since switching to Macrium Reflect Home things go way, way smoother. Now that is a program that works, is much faster and is well thought through. If I want to manually rename an image file I can do that, with True Image I could not. If I want to manually move backup files I can do that, with True Image I could not.
For me Macrium is much, much easier, and well worth the money. The savings are that I do not lose time anymore. With True Image I think I have lost a total of a couple of months in time (not exaggerated!). Now calculate the money value of that loss! Also see my earlier post to get Macrium Reflect cheaper.
ASRock Beebox J3160 - Win7 Ultimate x64
Asus VivoPC VC62B - Win7 Ultimate x64
Dell Latitude E6430 - Win7 Ultimate x64, Win10 Pro 22H2 x64 (multiboot)
Dell Latitude XT3 - Win7 Ultimate x86
Asus H170 Pro Gaming - Win10 Pro 22H2 x64
. Reason: Added clarification
. Reason: Added discount option for Macrium
Use the search function in the right woodgrain side panel to search for “Veeam.” There have been several discussions here in the past on the software.
PKCano: Thanks. There are 13 posts mentioning Veeam; only two reference its use with Windows and neither specifically report successful restores, especially BMRs. It’s easy to make backups; harder to do restores. 🙂
What was the full image backup software did you pick that, ensures that it’s saved in a way that the attackers can’t get access to it. ? I have a really hard time in decision making.
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