Do any of the file recovery software programs actually work?

[roger wiegand]

I run Carbon Copy Cloner to keep a local disk image backup every other day as an easy way to recover from hardware failures and Crashplan Pro for off-site, minute by minute backup. When disaster strikes I can reload the most recent disk image then fill in changed files from Crashplan. I can recover everything from crashplan (and have done so successfully a couple of times), but it is slow. Starting with a recent image kept locally makes it go quite quickly.

[Mark Bolton]

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. We are looking into everything offered. Much appreciated.

[Grant Wilkinson]

PM sent, Mark.

[John K Jordan]

Thanks so much Frank. Im headed there now to read. I appreciated it greatly.

My computer consultant highly recommends Macrium Reflect for backups. I've been using it for a year or so with some inexpensive 2 and 3 TB USB drives. It can easily be set for scheduled or on-demand full, incremental, or differential backups. Very quick. (It's not free but it's not expensive.)

The biggest key for robust backups is to keep more than one. When I worked for a living I'd be sunk with any data loss. I kept backups in at least three independent places and often backed up several times an hour. Now I'm retired and just play with the computer two backups is enough for me, updated three times a week.

JKJ

[Mark Bolton]

PM sent, Mark.

Got it, thank you!!

[Mark Bolton]

My computer consultant highly recommends Macrium Reflect for backups. I've been using it for a year or so with some inexpensive 2 and 3 TB USB drives. It can easily be set for scheduled or on-demand full, incremental, or differential backups. Very quick. (It's not free but it's not expensive.)

The biggest key for robust backups is to keep more than one. When I worked for a living I'd be sunk with any data loss. I kept backups in at least three independent places and often backed up several times an hour. Now I'm retired and just play with the computer two backups is enough for me, updated three times a week.

JKJ

So of course "three independent places" means three completely different physical locations. I considered myself in decent shape (and wasnt too bad off even if we'd lost what we thought we lost) but it has given me a cold chill thinking what if something more critical went poof. Im locked down on the cloud end at this point. Not sure whether to count two cloud options as 1, and 2, and then use an external here as the third. I often think that many backups are thumb drives/external drives and if the shop burned to the ground those two would be poof. The cloud was the remote.

Its miserable to have to invest all this time and effort into such things lol.

[Carlos Alvarez]

I'm unclear on what you're asking. So just some thoughts... A local hard drive backup is good. That's your primary backup for the most common failure--human error, and for the second most common--a hard drive failure. Backups onto cheap flash drives are sketchy, some have a high failure rate. Two separate online backups is excellent, and are indeed two more "locations." I also do yearly archives onto a Blu-ray, and that goes to another site.

My companies both use Google Apps/Drive for primary storage, so that's already backed up in several ways, and then the automatic sync to our machines means we have MANY MANY copies of the data. Basically the working data is its own backup, automatically.

[Mike Nolan]

Two things to remember.
At least one offsite backuo.
Occasionally test your backups. That is restore some file from each backup.