for now, I have backup plan to backup daily, Monday through Friday. or should I go with a monthly backup plan?
How critical is your data? What volume of changes do you make on a daily basis?
The answer to how often to backup lies in how much data you are willing to lose in the event of a hard drive failure. Some businesses need to backup hourly in order to prevent losing too much data, others less often because their data doesn't change as quickly.
If you lost an hour's worth or a week's worth of data how damaging would that be to you?
I have set macrium just now to backup every sat and sun only. its fine
You could also consider using File History to backup changed documents hourly (or daily). It isn't a replacement for full backups as it only covers your documents but can be a useful addition.
It runs in the background and is very helpful if you want to restore just one document you deleted or changed a couple of days or months ago.
File History - Turn On or Off in Windows 10 - Windows 10 blog
I backup every Sunday to an external drive, and also File History does back up every day.
Because data changes are not that much, for now, I average around 2-3 OS partition and data partition every two weeks or so.
I remember that terrible day when I downloaded what seemed like an innocent program to give me more cloud storage..its called cloudapp. do not trust it! it hijacked my pc. changed all the passes, including login. after 48 hours, I finally regained foothold..but after a hard reset. always backup, never know when youll need that life line.
Just have a backup plan on weekends
For such a question, there will be as many different answers as there are respondents. Eh?
One very wise man once said, "the only bad backup is the one you decided NOT to make."
I try not to make that BADdecision, and over the years I've probably had more hard drive crashes than the average person.
So I've probably gone above and beyond what would be the minimum backup scheme, to protect my own data files.
To really be safe, all backups should be made to external drives that can be UN-Plugged for safety.
External hard drives have gotten real cheap in the past few years. I have several of them, from a little 80GB, all the way up to a big 2TB drive.
Something that many folks don't take into account, is, if your Backup/Restore program is on your Windows drive, how will you do a restore to a new HD if your old HD has totally Crashed (stopped working, arc'd, sparked and smoked)? It DOES happen!
A: Your Backup/Restore program, and your backup of at least your C: drive, must be on some bootable media, like a CD or Flash Drive.
I boot up my own computer with the"Ghost"program on either a CD or Flash drive and I'm able to then do a backup or restore totally independent of Windows. That gives me great flexibility on doing both backups and restores.
And the nice thing about Ghost (Ghost 11.5, DOS Version) is that it will backup or restore any OS from '98 to W-10/64.
I just used it to copy Windows 10, Pro/64 from an old spinner to a new SSD.
For a quick and easy daily DATA backup, I use a little batch file which I wrote myself, to copy the "My Documents" folder to an external drive. I use the old faithful DOS program "XCOPY" in my batch file, to do the backup. It virtually just takes Seconds to do a daily backup. For Windows and everything else, I use Ghost 11.5to backup my C: partition to an external USB 3.0 hard drive, and I do this at least once a week.
At least once a month, I do a complete CLONE of my main hard drive to a 2TB drive that I only connect to the PC motherboard when I'm doing the backup. Then I disconnect it, for complete safety, from power surges or lightning strikes.
Once in a while, I have to do a recovery for one of my customers who has had a HD crash. It's really sad when there is NO backup, or the last backup is a year old. So much can be lost and never be recovered when a backup is either old or non-existent.
So in short......Backup! Backup! Backup!
Hi there
You actually can't have TOO many backups
Data that doesn't change much e.g media files etc you could archive as and when but as far as the OS and pgms is concerned backup BEFORE installing anything and I'd certainly backup daily.
If you have OS + pgms on a separate HDD / partition a backup with something like Macrium won't take too long -- on an SSD can take as little as 5 mins -- so no problems taking these regularly.
Cheers
jimbo
