Can anyone suggest a good app to do incremental backups of my Runtime? The Windows backup is OK, but doesn't compress the image, so I am wiping out 60 gig on my external HD straight up. I thought Drive Image and Ghost would do the job but alas the new versions only seem to want to do an entire drive not a directory. So ideas anyone?

One a month (or whenever) just burn a CD(s) or DVD of the whole runtime.

I wouldn't risk losing losing any data for the sake of 1 or 2 duff CD-Rewritable's. Plus packet writing software, like direct CD, isn't always that reliable. Decent blank media isn't that expensive.

Personally I backup all my data files once or twice a week.
And if it's really important I'll make a 2nd copy on a different brand of disc.

OK, this is a tad paranoid maybe, and I forget to backup sometimes and I still lose stuff. Plus sometimes it's a right pain in the a**se wading through all the CD's to find stuff. But I find it's safer this way.

Message edited on: 09/07/2005 17:18

One a month (or whenever) just burn a CD(s) or DVD of the whole runtime. Thanks for the input - but I'm really looking at some way to avoid using 17 DVDRW's every so often...... Hence the use of an external HD - however I'm after something that can do what Drive image does, as that gets my "C" drive of 23 gig down to a managable 8 gig image. There are some programs out there that do what I want but because they basically work under dos (at boot) - the newer devices such DVD drives and USB HD don't show up. Or am I missing something here?

An easy way to do it is using an USB hard drive, not a USB flash drive. Basically it's a small enclosure for a laptop hard drive. Recently, Seagate introduced a 100 GB 2.5" hard disk built into a slick enclosure for about US$220. Also there's an even smaller device from Transcend called StoreJet that offers 20 or 40 GB of storage.

17 DVD's! Ouch. I got so fed up with wading through acres of poser stuff, thats only used once or twice and spent a couple of hours "weeding". Got it down to under a gig, and remove stuff now after installing using some utility purchased here. kenyarb is right a external USB HDD would do the trick, and you could use this on another PC. As for the problem of calling that external HDD on startup that shouldn't be an issue with XP. If you are using Windows 98, then I've found making sure STIMON.exe is running in startup makes certain devices like USB keyrings work each time. Sticking the backup app in the startup folder "should" work on all versions of windows. As for backup software, your right. Ghost only seems to support a full drive/system backup these days. Having a quick search around.. http://www.abcbackup.com/screen.htm looks like a possibilty and theres a shareware demo. Or look around zd.net or tucows. If you find a solution please post.

As for backup software, your right. Ghost only seems to support a full drive/system backup these days. Yes - I am dissapointed with Ghost this time around - as I said above the Windows backup is OK, but I'm not saving any space - just making another 60 gig copy on a USB external drive, just be nice to have it compressed as ghost does... I will post back after looking around and give a heads up if I find anything worthwhile.....

Try Acronis True Image, it does drives only (both full and incremental) but it compresses, at standard compression level it will compress my Data-HDD (20Gb Runtime + 20Gb ZIP files) to 23Gb. What I do like is that it allows you to mount the backup as virtual HDD so you are able to copy files&folders from it if needed.

Attached Link: http://www.stompsoft.com/

Backup My PC by StompSoft.

Attached Link: http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

I actually found this one called Cobian Backup it's free and can be run either as an Application or Service. So you can automate your backups, it allows you to do just a directory - or several directories and gives you control over the compression level. Just trying it now - will report back

bookmark

OK - looking at Cobian, it's slow, in fact very slow when broken down the actual amount of data i needed to backup was 43.27 GB. I started at 15.02 yesterday and it is now 07.16 and it is at 77% - so it is really slow, however the good news is that using SQX compression (Zip Compression can also be used) the compressed file is only at 9.6 GB so it certainly saves a lot of space it seems as though the full backup will come in at under 12 GB, so I'm happy in that respect could actually put that on to DVD by using the split file function. Even though it's slow I would recommend it as you can set it up to do a differential backup say once a month then it will only backup if the source has been changed from the last FULL backup. If there is no need to copy the file, it will be skipped, saving backup time. So all in all I would recommend it as a viable option to make a recovery copy of your runtimes (as long as you don't mind waiting, it will run happily in the background)- sure beats backing up an entire drive and the space required for the image.

I also use Acronis True Image. The first backup was a couple hours (my entire HDD, 120 GB of data on a 160GB drive) and my every few days incrementals take 15-20 minutes, max.