Backup Software Recommendations

[EdfromCocoa]

Recommendations for backup software please:

Want to be able to do full, differential and incremental backups. Have 2 desktops and a Dell laptop. Will backup to external hard drive.

Looking for a package that is easy to use and does not require a license for each PC (if I have to purchase

 

[Schadenfroh]

You can get Acronis True Image for free if you have a Seagate or Maxtor HDD.

link:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=27&threadid=2134477

I have heard it is pretty good, I prefer Norton Ghost myself.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Check out Cobian.. it should be able to do full file oriented backups as well as incremental file backups. I don't believe / remember it doing anything like partition image backups, though, but those are of limited flexibility anyway. Check out some of the other links like clonezilla and paragon, macrium, terabyte, et. al. for complementary functions.


Free SyncBack version
http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html

Free synctoy 2.0:
http://www.microsoft.com/proph...loads/synctoybeta.aspx

Cobian backup 9: (makes zip files and does other useful things)
http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm


freeware as in open source:
http://www.clonezilla.org/
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php


Commercial software some of which are limited capability versions that are freely given out in one version, and have more capabilities if you pay for a better version:
http://www.macrium.com/ReflectFree.asp
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/index.htm
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/db-express/
http://www.macrium.com/ReflectFree.asp
http://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/

Maybe free commercial software with limited capabilities:
These are basically limited versions of Acronis' product AFAIK.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/
"DiscWizard" is free *if* you have a Seagate drive connected to your system.
"MaxBlast" is free *if* you have a Maxtor drive connected to your system.

 

[Navid]

The main reason Cobian is free, one could say, is that it uses the archive file attribute to determine which file has changed since the last backup in order to determine which file needs to be included in an incremental or differential backup.

This may sound OK at first. But, there is a conflict if you want to perform both differential and incremental on the same set of files.
A file that is backed up incrementally gets its attribute reset. Next when the differential task starts, those files that were included in the incremental will be excluded from the differential even though they should be included.

 

[sourceninja]

Do you want something that runs on each client and backups to a location, or a server/client setup.

For server client, I recommend amanda or backuppc,