Is this worth having

[PaulB]

For my C: drive I do a full backup every Sunday morning. I keep the previous three backups so I can recover even if I don't notice something straight away.

For the continuous backups to cloud I use Acronis TrueImage. For files that I modify frequently this keeps copies from the previous hour, day, week, month etc.

To a certain extent, we seem to follow the same practices. I do full backups of C: and D: at 04:00 every Sunday morning and incrementals of both seven days a week at 18:00. I keep 4 generations of backups.

You piqued my curiosity with your backups to the cloud. I will have to see if my backup package (StorageCraft ShadowProtect) provides this feature. Are these 'continuous' backups to the cloud incrementals done on a very short interval, or are they actually done in real-time?

[DaveA]

I also have separate C: drive for my operating system and apps, and D: drive for my data.
I do a full image backup of C: every week, and every now and again I have had to restore it
I do a continual backup of D: to a cloud service so that I can recover any data files that I need to
I also do a daily backup of D: to another hard drive, to speed up recovery if I ever need to restore the whole thing

This is using 2 hard drives and NOT partitions?

[StuartR]

You piqued my curiosity with your backups to the cloud. I will have to see if my backup package (StorageCraft ShadowProtect) provides this feature. Are these 'continuous' backups to the cloud incrementals done on a very short interval, or are they actually done in real-time?

There is a delay of a few minutes after you close a file before it appears on the cloud backup. According to Acronis help "The shortest interval between the incremental backup operations is five minutes. This allows you to recover your system to an exact point in time". Also note that this is not a traditional incremental backup. If you modify a really large file very frequently it doesn't use up all your storage space.

[StuartR]

This is using 2 hard drives and NOT partitions?

I missed that question Dave. Sorry.

Yes. My system disk and data disk are separate SSD drives

[DaveA]

This is using 2 hard drives and NOT partitions?

I missed that question Dave. Sorry.

Yes. My system disk and data disk are separate SSD drives

I just wanted to be sure, there are way to many people that use "Partitions" and think that they are protected in losing data when one Partition get messed up.

[Argus]

This is using 2 hard drives and NOT partitions?

I missed that question Dave. Sorry.

Yes. My system disk and data disk are separate SSD drives

I just wanted to be sure, there are way to many people that use "Partitions" and think that they are protected in losing data when one Partition get messed up.

I don't think Stuart is one of them.

(That said, even if my setup is the same as his, having two partitions, C & D, on one drive isn't much of a problem as long as they are backed up to a separate drive; some even keep their data on their system drive, remember. So I don't understand your question, he, and other, wasn't talking about D as the backup drive.)

[StuartR]

My laptop only has one SSD. I have one partition for the C: drive. The other partition has my encrypted D: drive.
This way I can restore the operating system and applications without disturbing the data, if I ever need to.
I can also back up all the data frequently, but only backup the operating system once a week.

[ChrisGreaves]

I also do a daily backup of D: to another hard drive, to speed up recovery if I ever need to restore the whole thing

Interesting.
I backup my data drive (T:) to a 463GB USB drive every night. The batch file first copies the C:\Users\Chris072 folder to the data drive.
Sunday nights after the back of tghe data drive, I RoboCopy the 463GB drive to a 950GB drive which gives me an "accumulated" backup, and then make a mirror image of the T: drive to its backup.
In this way I retain everything, and the data backup drive is not cluttered with deleted files, if you get my drift. That is, the data backup drive is never more than a week shy of reality.
Cheers
Chris

[DaveA]

Some people think that the partitions will protect their data if there is a hardware issue with any of the other partitions.
I have been told by newbie's, that partitions are NOT affected by other partition failures, as we all know that is not true.

Just a word that the only safe way is to have multi hardware, so if there is a hardware failure on one drive it will NOT affect the others.
If there is a failure on any partition, then all other partitions are also non functional!

Yes the above backup methods will result in good recover of all OS and data.
But they require that all partitions would need to built on the replacement hard drive.