Prompted by KIAB's post: I wondered how people back up their PCs/data. I bought a 2TB NAS drive which was great, but found it was lacking space - backing up files that include photos and videos, and full system images, it soon got full. So then I bought another one, a 2 bay Synology NAS with 2x3TB drives in RAID 0 config giving 6TBs of contiguous space. It also hosts a Squeezebox Touch server so I can store and stream all my CDs in original quality format to my hifi. One of the best purchases I ever made.
Some never sadly. Got my nephew's pc to sort out, it's a cesspit, orginally partioned the hard drive into OS, Downloads & Games, but he put things into OS which shouldn't be there, so I can't just reformat that partion, also I had set it up to back up to a NAS I have, he disabled the function because it's slows down his gaming (total BS I say). OS is Windows 7 Home Premium, which won't support more than 16GB of memory, so that has to go,will use Windows 7 Professional as that supports more memory, up to 192GB in fact. What I thought was going to be a simple job is far from that.
These jobs are never simple. I did have a 1TB drive, which got full. So I bought a 3TB drive and added it, and structured the thing so that OS/apps are on the 1TB drive and all data is on the 3TB drive. It means I only have to do a system image of the 1TB (although I do occasionally do a system image of the data drive too) and use SyncToy to keep a backup of the data files. Did think about replacing the 1TB with an SSD but read horror stories of these things failing. I may do so in future. Its 7 years old now but still going strong, thanks to some foresight. i7-920 processor, RAM is maxed I think at 24GB and its a good AMD 5850 graphics card. 3 monitors too
Just had a Samsung 250GB 850 EVO ssd arrive this morning, has a 5 year warrenty, going to use it soley for the OS hopefully. Got a ssd on the new lappy here & it boots up in about 20 seconds, rather impressed with it. The i7-920 is still a very good cpu.
I might try that then. What really kills me are the big Windows 10 updates, they can take several hours to complete during which time of course, the PC is unusable. Not sure what the issue is and the disk isn't thrashing.
I'm selective on Window 10 updates, install only what's needed,I also disabled a lot of not required features in OS. https://www.cnet.com/uk/how-to/10-things-to-disable-in-windows-10/ http://www.ghacks.net/2016/06/18/turn-off-windows-10-features/
The way I back up now is use Win 10 (but you can do it in 8 as well) to create a disk image on a USB harddrive. What many people do not know, is that latest windows allows you to mount an image as a virtual drive, assign a letter to it and extract individual files, so a disk image can work as both a complete image and a means of backing up individual files. plus I have dropbox and sync to my laptop. Having used a backup after hard disk failure, I'm somewhat paranoid
Back-up? I could bet I have the most over-complicated back-up solution here. All PC's run Veeam, so they have an incremental backup weekly and a full backup every month. This all goes to a FreeNAS computer, with a ZFS raid pool of four 2 terabyte drives. The main FreeNAS server is backed up to a second FreeNAS server weekly, and these backups are stored for 6 months. I copy these across to hard drives every so often, which are stored at the In-laws house. Some day I'll get a FreeNAS computer setup there, and copy the files over the internet. I also have a point to point radio dish on my roof that communicates with a dish at a local social club. I host networked storage, the POS controller and a CCTV backup for them. Hence the over-the-top backup system.
The Samsung Evo 850 pro's are my favorite SSDs. Good value for money too. The 920 is a good cpu. I had one running at 3.9GHz stable
One of the biggest benefits to Windows 10 Pro, you can disable automatic updates. It is still pushy on them, but you can cancel them.
I'm not a big fan of Raid 0, but anyway. How many times are you backing up the same files. Seems a lot to fill up +2Tb of data without multiples? Personally I keep most files on my OneDrive do backups are accounted for automatically. But I do run a 500Gb USB drive running a windows backup of local files.
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