i'm trying to find a good backup method.
i have an 100GB internal drive on my t60p, and planning on upgrading my 200GB ultrabay drive to a 500gb one.

traditionally, i would manually make a copy of everything on my ultrabay drive, onto an external USB drive, about once a month.
but now i'm looking for a more efficient process, and am exploring the options.

i like my traditional method because i can simply view all the files on the backup drive in windows explorer.
the problem with my traditional method is,
a) it's only once a month or longer, when i find the time to do it.
b) it re-copies data onto the external drive that hasn't even been modified since the last backup, taking much longer.

so my questions are:
what backup systems are people using?
an always active live backup system?
a backup software that does incremental or differential backups?
what about backup software that comes with an external drive purchase?
what about R&R? are people actually using it? and does it do incremental backups?
i already use R&R for backing up the OS and installed software, but can i restore those from a usb drive?
or boot from a USB drive?

i am planning on purchasing an external hard drive, most likely 1TB, but then there options for RAID drives, network drives, or basic USB 2 drives.

and then there's ghosting as backup?

any input would be greatly appreciated,
thanks!

R&R does incremental backups. You may also try Macronis Reflect, Image for Windows and Acronis TrueImage.

Or you may use an online backup service like Mozy.

Cheers.

as of right now, R&R isn't giving me an option to backup the ultrabay drive onto another drive.
so i guess the only way to do that would be manual copy and paste? w/o the benefit of incremental backups?

does there exist, a free software, that will sync or mirror your ultrabay onto an external usb2 drive, whenever you plug it in? without running in the background?

i'm assuming you can't do the same with a primary internal laptop drive, that would save the OS and software installed?
if not i can use R&R for that, but the i still need something for the ultrabay drive.

thanks,

bump

Check out SyncToy and other similar synchronization utilities.

thanks, i tested synctoy, comodo, and 1 or 2 others, and decided the best free one was syncback, for future ref.

seems like there are some decent "timeline" style backup systems, but i didn't see any free ones so far.

Slightly different situation here as my desktop is my main machine and I use the Thinkpad as a hot spare/test machine for it, but the backup methodolgy works just as well.
Always been happy enough to use proprietary backup software for system partition but as mentioned in original post, I like my backup volume(s) to be easily accessible through Windows Explorer.

Here's my set up, with the drive partitioned as C: containing only OS and installed programs and D: having ALL my user data.

Weekly backup of C: to external USB drive. Take second copy of that image file to second USB drive.
Incremental backup DOS batch file using XCOPY of my critical D: locations, which can be run manually from DOS box or from Start menu. This incremental backup also occurs whenever I shut the system down. The backup location is both to a Backup folder on D: and my second internal (clone) drive.
Manually run differential XCOPY batch (backup) file of complete D: volume run as required to external USB drive.
Manually run differential XCOPY batch (archive) file of complete D: volume run as required to second external USB drive
Manual clone of primary drive to secondary drive run about once a month or more frequently if significant software changes on system.

The backup folder on D: where the incremental backups go has subdirectory names that are date and timestamped, so I can easily locate a particular version of the file I wish to restore. I usually keep about 2 months worth of data incrementally backed up. A little VBS program that runs inside the DOS batch file before the XCOPY warns me when this Backup folder is getting too large.
I am able to keep about 8 versions of the the weekly system images, so I can restore a fair way back, should I encounter a severe Windows related software failure.

The backup external drive is used for differential restore to my Thinkpad using XCOPY.

Only additional software used apart from what's in Windows (namely XCOPY) is Perfect Image for system backups, which is actually Paragon Hard Disk Manager re-badged by Avanquest.
On my Thinkapad, I'm now using the Paragon Backup & Restore Free edition for system backups, whereas before my Windows 7 upgrade at the weekend, I was using an old version of Acronis True Image.

thanks for the response.

quick question before i look into these options more,
since you're on windows 7,
any attempts at the built in backup/restore system on windows 7?
and it has a predesktop winRecoverEnvironment as well?

thanks,

I've haven't looked at what Windows 7 itself offers.
From using ntbackup years ago I suspect it's not going to be better than what I currently do. Traditionally the big problem with ntbackup was the stand-alone restore, which was clumsy.

All products like Paragon and Acronis use a simple boot disk (it's the install CD if you buy the boxed version) to enable a stand-alone restore.

Not sure what they've done in Windows 7 regarding the pre-desktop environment. I know that on a full install, Windows 7 now creates a 100Mb recovery partition by default. If you install onto an already partitioned drive this doesn't occur. I did a custom install as I was upgrading from XP so no silly extra partition. They've removed the ability to install the Windows Recovery Console though.

Recovery partitions and the like only seem useful to me if, once you've booted into them, you can access your latest backups to restore your system. Furthermore, if the drive goes west you still need a CD to boot from to be able to do a stand-alone restore. The traditional ThinkPad recovery mechanism with a factory image recovery seemed useless to me. If my Windows system needs restoring what good is a factory image ? It's going to be so out of date as to be useless.

My use of DOS batch files to automate all the backups stems from the fact that at one time that's all there was, yes I'm that old
If you wish to use a GUI tool look at Robocopy which now has a GUI and Richcopy. Both of these are from Microsoft and can be donwloaded free from Technet. The command line Robocopy is included in Vista and Windows 7.

One final point, once you start making regaular backups ensure you test your recovery procedures. It's no good having loads of backups and when the worst happens you find for some reason, you cannot restore

ah, as far as i'm concerned,
if they make a backup system that's hard for an average computer user to understand, they've failed.