How many times do you take a backup for your windows ?

**webMaster412160** · July 21, 2009, 02:33 PM

I did 3 day's ago, it is very important if your windos gets a virus or gets bugged that you have a copy of it.

So when do you do it ?

It takes of cours much free space but it's worth it.

**Freddie** · July 21, 2009, 02:50 PM

Originally Posted by master412160

I did 3 day's ago, it is very important if your windos gets a virus or gets bugged that you have a copy of it.

So when do you do it ?

It takes of hours much free space but it's worth it.

The honest answer is I don't backup as often as I should despite having an external hard drive right in front of me all it would take is 5 minutes just to copy the My Documents Folder across to it. Generally I backup my hard drive and files either when I'm clearing up my hard drive to free up space or when I'm about to format the hard drive.

**Strelok** · July 21, 2009, 02:58 PM

In my experience, under the optimization and maintenance I do, I keep my OS installs running without any performance or stability hitches and malware free. Things stay like that until I have some sort of hardware failure, in which then I have to replace the failing component, dependent on what actually failed, I can still keep my old Windows install, unless the OS disk died or my motherboard died, which in that case I then do a full OS re-install. I've actually never had random OS failure or file system corruption that was not due to some experimental procedure that I undertook. Right now I use a Windows XP / Vista dual-boot setup and I sometimes triple-boot with a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu.

I backup only truly essential data onto blank RW disks, such as long text documents and game savegames. This procedure is done once a week. I also create a system restore point and backup the registry, which I also do once a week (windows). I've never used a hard disk or flash drive for backing up, as those are prone to random failure. I keep the blank disks in enclosures, so the only time the data is not accessible is when my DVD-drive dies, but I still have my data. I also ensure I burn disks at a slow speed so that they do not get damaged.

**Juli26** · July 21, 2009, 04:02 PM

In my current PC I have done only the backup of My Documents and that was in Febrary. In general I don't backup the files often. If my PC gets a malware (in fact the last time I got one was 1 year ago) I would just reformat it since my files are almost the same with some small exceptions(music, pictures etc). I have all my programs to disks though. Generally I don't care about the savegames and such things, but the combo Firefox+no script addon helps much in the malware area.

**Jaketh** · July 21, 2009, 04:11 PM

ive never backed up because i have nothing i can backup to

**29 days later** · July 21, 2009, 05:50 PM

I backup to an external hard drive every so often. I used to backup to DVD's and CD's but I kept finding when it was time for me to read the data of the discs often files would be broken which was very frustrating so I invested in an external hard drive which has worked wonders.

I advice anyone hear who takes backup semi seriously not to rely on optical discs, apparently disc quaility is very low which is something I've know for the past 5 years, I just don't trust optical discs. If you worried about failure of an external hard drive then invest in several USB thumb sticks, their cheap as chips these days and capacities are more then enough for backing up your My Documents folder (although you might need a separate one for music).

**mrmouth** · July 21, 2009, 09:28 PM

I just make an image, after the initial OS install. I don't really backup anything.

**Wheelchair** · July 22, 2009, 12:19 AM

I have a 16GB Flashdrive that I keep connected to my PC all the time. So when I reformat It takes literally 3 minutes to put all my essential low profile programs I usually keep on a OS (Chrome, CPUZ, GPUZ, Etc)

**Musthavename** · July 22, 2009, 07:27 AM

Anything important I burn to DVDs.

I can never generally be bothered backing up my installation. If it goes wrong, I spend a couple hours putting something back on, not that big a deal imo. Though, when i've built PCs and had initial problems i've done ghost images, but generally after it's gone a month fine I never bother with backups.

If you worried about failure of an external hard drive then invest in several USB thumb sticks, their cheap as chips these days and capacities are more then enough for backing up your My Documents folder (although you might need a separate one for music).

On the contrary, I wouldn't trust USB sticks. I've had several of them break and wouldn't rely on them for anything other than file transfer.

**Richard** · July 22, 2009, 07:33 AM

What's some good software to use for a complete image?

**Strelok** · July 22, 2009, 07:38 AM

What's some good software to use for a complete image?

I use Acronis True Image. Some people prefer Norton Ghost, however.

**mrmouth** · July 23, 2009, 09:58 PM

Originally Posted by TheAnonymous

I use Acronis True Image. Some people prefer Norton Ghost, however.

Acronis is by the better software.

**Richard** · July 22, 2009, 08:00 AM

Thankyou sir. That + Microsoft SyncToy for 'data' synced backups shall do me nicely

**Roman_Wolf** · July 22, 2009, 08:03 AM

I only have OS + software on drive C, while I have everything else including setup files on drives D and E. So I never backup because basically formatting is pretty easy and barely takes anytime and I lose nothing.