Backups – My 15 Year Curse
Until recently I thought I’d cracked a problem that has bugged me on and off for 15 years, and that’s taking backups of files and directories on my PC.
There’s certainly no shortage of software available to take backups, but finding backup software that actually works as advertised is something I’m yet to achieve.
You see I’m old enough to remember and have used tape drives, which at the time I thought was the answer to being able to take large drive backups of up to 4GB wow!
One of many problems I found with my quality HP drive and driver software was that it couldn’t take backups of files in use.
That meant it was useless for taking backups of the Windows operating system which was the main reason I bought it. Could I find anywhere it said that in the instructions – nope.
Fast forward 10 years and many backup solutions later I thought I had found the one solution I needed – Norton Ghost. I could even take and restore backups over a network, just what I needed.
A word from the wise here, no matter what backup solution you’re using always test to see if you can restore a backup before you need to do it for real. It’s surprising what little things you find.
Norton Ghost for instance allows you to take complete drive backups from a partitioned disk, but when you restore that drive it wipes the whole disk first. So if you’ve got other drive partitions on the disk their history. I found that out once and where did I find the warning about this, there wasn’t one.
To be fair to Norton they did add a warning about this to a later version of the software but that didn’t do me much good at the time.
Another word from the wise, don’t rely upon one method of backup, you need at least two and more likely three. If you think I’m paranoid about backups you’d be right, but then I’ve had too many experiences of backup methods failing.
Fast forward again to the past 12 months and I added a new backup software aptly named Stuffit. After several months of problems that the developer was not interested in fixing I finally did Stuffit – in the bin.
Next came Turbobackup, similar to Stuffit it enabled me to schedule backups of selected files and directories, zip them up and save them to another drive. Now there shouldn’t really be anything difficult in that you would think – well no maybe, unless your using ResourceEater, I mean Turbobackup.
All was going so well, it took the backups usually as scheduled, but not always, until one day I noticed my PC was getting slower and slower each time Turboeater ran. Anyone spotted the clue yet, I’m sure you PC buff’s have, it was eating computer resources faster than PacMan. I have 1000MB of fixed RAM memory and it was at its peak consuming about 750MB of it.
Complaints to the developer soon revealed they had a problem, yet another undisclosed bug. There was a workround but not a very satisfactory one and despite continuing to use it Turbobackup bit the dust a few days ago.
It had developed a will of its own, not taking backups when it should, creating double backups of the same directories and throwing up warning pop-ups all over the place. It had to go.
Never believe what it says on the packet or the software website. It’s not what they tell you, it’s what they don’t tell you.
I still need to do these backups, so after wading through backup software’s that I researched and dismissed without trying, I’m left with a software called SyncBack. I’m hoping this will be 3rd time lucky or else in a few weeks or months I’ll have a new name for this backup software, maybe I could call it …… SickBag or ……… SinkBuck.
As an update to this entry I can report SyncBack failed. You can find the followup entry at Windows Backup Software - Handy Backup Saves the Day
Tony Simpson
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