February 8, 2007 in Tools by Mark Levison

In this week’s Windows Secrets Fred Langa (http://windowssecrets.com/comp/070208#langa2) suggests the use of the disk imaging or NTBackup (Windows built-in backup tool) as the best ways to backup a computer (he far prefers imaging). Both are weak. Disk imaging includes all of the cruft I’ve accumulated on my system and requires lots of extra disk space. NTBackup is even worse. It creates an archive that can only be read by NTBackup. Occasionally these archives become corrupt and then you have no backup. Often you only discover the corruption when you attempt to restore.

Pure file backups are better because:

  • you don’t need a special tool to read them
  • restore is a matter of copying just a few key files
  • along with automatic verification you can walk the directory structure to make sure you trust

Instead try the command line tool hobocopy (written by Craig Andrea).
Hobocopy – just copies files, supports volume shadow copy, incremental
backups, best of all its free. (effectively its Robocopy with VSS
support).

 

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