backup?

[MadMan]

I was wondering if anyone uses windows 7 back up or any other software to back up. I only want to back up the os, programs, game saves and documents as my hard drive is at 200gb and that's a lot of stuff to back up.

 

[vanthus]

I use windows7 own backup program Madman,and have succesfully used a back up on two replacement hard disks.

 

[Wozza63]

i never bother with backing up OS and programs as these take a large amount of space and can easily be reinstalled, i always have 2 copies of important documents on my hard drive and external hard drive, sometimes on a flash stick as well

 

[MadMan]

I use windows7 own backup program Madman,and have succesfully used a back up on two replacement hard disks.

What do you include in the backup?

 

[vanthus]

I make a full system image backup,this can be set to back up periodically,but I just do it manually every couple of months or so,
you can also save space by deleting all but the latest backup.
If you prefer you can choose what you want to backup,
To save me rambling on check out this excellent tutorial.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/1838/using-backup-and-restore-in-windows-7/

 

[MadMan]

Thanks Vanthus + rep . Im gonna use my external hard drive as discs will be a lot of copies. Im going to back up the os, all the programs, my documents and game saves only. My games library is like 100gb so thats too much. So if my hard drive fails i can use this backup and my pc will be identical to how it is now minus my games? Thanks

 

[vanthus]

Thanks Vanthus + rep . Im gonna use my external hard drive as discs will be a lot of copies. Im going to back up the os, all the programs, my documents and game saves only. My games library is like 100gb so thats too much. So if my hard drive fails i can use this backup and my pc will be identical to how it is now minus my games? Thanks

Yes,it should be identical,minus what you choose not to backup.

 

[tom_gr7]

I use windows backup, its very useful, had to used it myself a few times. I just let windows crack on and backup whatever it wants to back up.

 

[MadMan]

cheers guys.

 

[perky]

I use Acronis TrueImage to back up my PC. I do a full image back up once a week to an external USB drive, and differential backup for each day in the week (other options like incremental backups are also possible). All this is automated using the scheduler and runs at 2.00am each morning.

The backups are compressed and encrypted, but they can be mounted and accessed in a normal exporer window which means you can very easily recover backed up files.

The best thing about this though is that since they are full image backups, they can be restored directly to your hard disk and you can recover your entire system without any re-installation at all. You do that by creating a bootable CD and booting from that to run the recovery program. It is also possible to restore the backup directly to a larger disk than the original, which makes upgrading to a larger disk trivial (I've done this twice times with my old A30 laptop, upgrading from the original 40G drive to 200G!).

See http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/

Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with Acronis, I just think the software is very useful!