Windows 10: Questions - Backup strategies for a personal home desktop PC

Well I'm cruising along with my three week old inexpensive HP Pavilion desktop. They waste so much metal to encase a couple of innards, a little motherboard, a 1TB drive and a silly low output power supply. The rest is air. Hope these things are mostly getting recycled when they expire. Plenty of room but no amps to expand, but then there aren't any empty sockets on the MB anyway. That's only a little disappointing to me. Would've been nice to put my old 320 gig disk in it. And maybe a sound card. But it runs great and I like 10 too. I also have a new 2TB Seagate slim drive and their Dashboard software for my scheduled backups, plus two 320GB drives in USB enclosures, right now doing nothing but containing old files and an Acronis image of my old machine.

My first order of business was deciding on a backup system. After asking around here, I made a Win10 and a Seagate Image just to see how it works but untested for restoring so far. I also ran a Seagate file backup. So right now I'm making a weekly Macrium image and Seagate image. Yesterday I decided to add a continuous Seagate file backup.

But I haven't weeded out and prioritized all this, which is the reason for my post. I see no reason not to use Windows for its semi-continuous file backup, as frequent as every 10 minutes, although fully continuous with Seagate might feel less intrusive. I don't know the feel of this machine enough yet to tell the difference. Opinions are welcome. Another worry I have about either continuous method is, if I get an infection, I could be backing up corrupt files... couldn't I? And then what of the rest of the folders on the backup drive, are they at risk? The Seagate drive is box stock, I've changed nothing about the file system.

I do like the Macrium program, and after reading many good reports, I'm calling it a keeper. So, what about my routine, I'd like opinions on whether to keep running both Windows and Seagate images weekly. And what of the continuous file backups; Windows or Seagate? And should they be on a separate drive from my images? The thought of testing the backup images makes me cringe, I don't really feel like rebuilding my settings and all if it fails.

I hope I've clearly explained what I'm curious about. Thanks for any input.
Rusty

:)

 

Turn on File History in Windows 10

Please consider in the future starting a new question, regarding the specifics of your device, your error messages, and/or issues with Microsoft's FileHistory..... Please make sure you have a good backup strategy.... The Win10 FileHistory works very well,
on a safe, secure, and stable system.. But is only one part of a good backup strategy.

 

What files are considered as "Personal Files"?

Good question. 'Personal files' means the files you store in your user account. More specifically, it's the contents of these folders:

Desktop*

Documents

Downloads

Music

Pictures

Saved Games

Searches

Videos

There may be additional folders I'm not aware of that are also included in 'Personal folders.'

*What you see on your desktop is a combination of 3 'desktop' folders: the desktop folder in your personal account, the desktop folder in the Public account, and Windows' own desktop folder.

Although the 'Keep personal files' option works, it's always a good idea to backup your personal files before making major changes to your computer. (It's a good idea to backup every day regardless.)

Nobody knows what you have on your D drive.

 

Macrium is tops and Windows imaging is useless. I don't know the Seagate one.

I would not do continuous file backup for the reasons you stated.

A seperate drive for images is recommended. And best, it should be disconnected when not in use.

Test you imaging on a small test partition. I use a 2GB partition for that purpose. If that works, the rest will work too..

 

Excellent, you knocked it out in four quick sentences, thanks WHS.
Okay, then, should I go to Disk Management, create a small partition, copy some random files into it and test it out... And if I later delete that partition, will it give the space back to the system drive without scrambling anything? Sorry, I've been mostly away from doing partitioning since the shaky old days.
Rusty

 

Yeah, do the small partition routine. You can always reclaim the space with disk management - and we are only talking about 2GB anyhow. I myself keep that 2GB partition around. Have already done all kinds of little tests with it.

 

Yeah, that occurred to me as I was writing the question.
This is good, I like my new system, just wish I could have bought a little more. All of my rear USB ports are taken, and I have no mic jack unless I unplug my side speakers on my 5.1 sound. I tried to find a way to reconfigure the front earphone jack, but it will only accept a combo headset, which I don't want.

 

Long term wise, plan on at least bi-monthly [weekly if your computer makes you money], making at least one if not two full-images of your OS partition and data partition onto at least one if not two external usb platter-clatter hard-drives. Over here, I rotate several.

 

Okay, thanks for your answers. I've set up three external platter clatter drives that stay unplugged between backup days, I'm running one Macrium image, one Windows image and one frequent data file backup, each on a separate drive.. I always run MBAM before backup time.

I'm taking some of y'all's advice and discontinuing Ccleaner, which I always ran prior to backups on my old Win7 system. I also created a test partition on my system drive to test restore functions.

How many of you ditched Norton Security(on my computer) or McAffee etc., and rely only on Win Defender? I am inclined to keep NS as it's worked very well for me ever since my computers became powerful enough to run it.

Thanks all, for your patience with all of my questions.
Rusty

 

Control panel - system - backup and restore (win7)

 

Yes, that would be the Windows image I mentioned. Unless you're getting at something else?