Windows 10, backup

gad-westy

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Hi all. I've always had IT bods to turn to for this sort of thing but now I've gone freelance, I need to learn some things for myself.

I use Macs for home use but for work I need to use a windows laptop. Windows 10 to be precise.

On the Macs at home, I use time machine. The desktop is permanently plugged into a backup drive and just creates backups on the fly. Also runs back blaze in the backgroud. The laptop, I just plug into its own backup drive every week or so and it automatically runs a time machine backup.

Is there anything as slick for windows 10, where I can just plug into an external drive when I'm working at home? I think I'll run back blaze on it too.
 
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Acronis gets my vote as well, I've been using it for years and it's never let me down.
I have it set up so that it does incremental system back ups for my desktop and laptop and it stores them on my NAS.
If I need to do a resintall of the OS I just copy them onto a USB stick, boot up using the Acronis bootable CD, point it at the restore image and it's job done.
 
Another good thing about Acronis is that it's easy to drill down into an image with Windows Exploder and extract a single file if required.
Other backup products may also do this but I have no personal experience of them.
 
The built in Windows backup software is what I use. Slick and free.

Its called file history - turn it on with a backup drive connected and it does a first full backup. This takes
hours if you have lots of data. Thereafter it automatically backs up changed / new files.
 
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The built in Windows backup software is what I use. Slick and free.

Its called file history - turn it on with a backup drive connected and it does a first full backup. This takes
hours if you have lots of data. Thereafter it automatically backs up changed / new files.

Where do you find that?
 
Windows Backup was what i used to use until i ran into problems with it, it worked great for a few months but then started hanging at 97% completion, google told me a lot of people were having the same problem, and none of the solutions posted worked, once i lost confidence in it i didn't want to trust my backups to it anymore.

I know use Back Blaze for Windows, so far so good.
 
Thanks again for all the input folks. On my ever growing to-do list to sort this, this week. Much appreciated.
 
I use Second Copy. It is software that can be set to copy files from one place to another at times and regularity you specify. It compares what you already have and does incremental saves after the first one as most systems do but it can also be set to sync two locations. I use it to sync my laptop with my main desktop computer so that where ever I have been working the files are on both computers.

I have a second hard drive on each computer to back up to, which it does every 2 hours, and then every week I have a removable USB hard drive to do another weekly backup which otherwise is disconnected for protection against the system suffering an encryption attack.

It is a little fiddly to set up as you can specify types of files to backup or not if you want to but it has worked for me and I do not have to have to pay an ongoing cloud fee or worry that files on the cloud will be hacked.

I'm sure it is not for everyone but it suits me.

Andy
 
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