Windows 10 Backup Software

[Phillip Brooks]

My company has decided to save money and switch from full Carbonite backups of our systems to some sort of M$ Office Cloud feature that only backs up our documents under our users.

Apparently there is no option to support anything outside of the /Users folders

I've decided to connect a USB-C 3.2 drive to my Dell dock and use that as a local backup device.

Windows backup sucks. Anyone have a good suggestion for a reliable incremental backup utility?

[gleichman]

I've heard good things about Duplicati (https://www.duplicati.com/). I haven't implemented it yet, but it's on my list of things to do. It runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOS, so it can be run on a NAS to backup to the cloud.

[Jordan Kuehn]

I've used this in the past as an inexpensive insurance policy. I've never had to restore from backup though.

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html

[Bryan]

I use "Synkron" and "Create Synchronicity" for daily backups of my laptop to a USB HD.  

Edit: They're both free.

Edited August 5, 2020 by Bryan

[ThomasGutzler]

We use Macrium, the free version. It does the job. Also never had to restore... yet

[hooovahh]

For personal use at home I use Acronis.  I've only ever used it for whole OS backing up.  It supports incremental backups, and has a pretty decent scheduler.  So my home computers all backup to a network location once a month doing an incremental backup.  This is much smaller but only tracks the differences from one backup to another.  After 5 incremental backups it performs a full backup.  After so many backups it deletes the old ones.  There was a 3 pack of software that went on sale years ago which came with a mail in rebate basically making it free.  It has a CD image that you can boot to restore the image from outside of the OS, or in most cases can select from within Windows the image to restore, then it reboots and restores it.  Again this is more useful for OS back up, and probably not what you want but it likely does work with just a set of folders.

[Phillip Brooks]

Thanks all,

I've loaded and started playing with Synkron; not enough experience with it yet to decide if I will stay with it.

Acronis is probably the best bet, but this is my work laptop and I don't want to spend my own money to have the same security I've had in the past.

I had my laptop stolen about three years ago while travelling. When we initially added Carbonite to all systems, they told us it was full disk backups. The IT dept told me after the loss that they had purposely changed Carbonite to back up only the user folders to reduce the storage costs. My user.lib and instr.lib were lost and I had to dig up some very old manual copies and rework them all. I was able to modify the Carbonite settings on my replacement laptop and occasionally check that I still have a full backup available. So far so good, at least until we discontinue Carbonite for the M$ solution.

Everyone is pushing cloud-based services backups with subscriptions, but I did find after digging around on the Acronis site that they still sell a perpetual one-time license as well.

Edited August 6, 2020 by Phillip Brooks

[ASTDan]

Little late but I have been using this

 

https://www.ubackup.com/

 

Seems to work.  I have it back up to my NAS.  

[Neil Pate]

I used Crashplan for years (paid version, got a good deal for a 5 year offer) and it was pretty good for a while but seemed to stagnate a bit. Never needed to do a restore though.

Now I use Google sync and just pay a bit for 2 TB or so of space.

I am paranoid to not have my backup to the same physical location as my PC. Here in South Africa houses get broken into and robbed of all their stuff with enough regularity to make me very nervous to do this!

I do have a NAS which I manually back up to from time to time when I can remember to, FreeFileSync is a really great tool. I think it can also do real-time monitoring and syncing but I do not do this.