What is Reddit's opinion of Cobian Backup?

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if you want something easy that just works, you can install http://www.acebackup.com/highlights.htm (it's free)

Personally, I use Cobian backup: http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

It's not as easy and straightforward, but it's very advanced and flexible - and free! Supports basically everything. And it will do Shadow Copies, which means it backs up files that are locked by other programs (for example Outlook).

Compare software list, I recommend Meld and WinMerge. You might be interested in differential backups, Cobian used to be a nice piece of software.

I do backup from my data drive to a second internal drive weekly using Cobian Backup currently and have been using this software for years now. Great and free.

http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

>Can anyone recommend a backup software that can use a mapped drive or UNC share as a backup target.

>We would also like to use something that provides an email notification on success.

Cobian Backup

http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

You mean using one as a backup instead of one time copying and pasting?

I actually just recently discovered a program called Cobian backup. I am actually doing my first backup on it now, and it looks pretty damn promising.

You can in fact do a simple mirror backup, select ~~differential~~ incremental backup, and choose whatever directories you want for source and destination. For one thing, lets say you want to backup your PC files to both external hard drives for redundancy, you can select both of them as a destination and it will create a copy for each of them. It also has a decent step by step tutorial to get you started.

If you're looking for a file level backup, cobian is quite feature rich and free: http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

Won't help with machine state, or virtual machine imaging. I use it to backup my raw file structure date (file shares) to an external drive.

If a client asks me to setup a backup that they do not have to pay for, I normally go with Cobian backup:

http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

However, I would like to point out it's under new ownership now, its very powerful and somewhat easy to setup, if you client wants to watch the backups and check to see if they were succesful, though, its a bit of a pain in that regard.

No problems with it in the last couple years though.

• Create recovery media.

There should be an option to burn a set of DVDs or a flash drive that, when booted from, will reset the computer to its out of box factory state. Create these, put them in a safe spot, and if anything goes to shit, these will make your life much easier.

• pcdecrapifier

This will allow you to remove a bunch of bloat programs as a batch. Perfect for getting bloat off a new computer.

• Backups

If you just want a regular backup program, I recommend Cobian. If you want to create backup images of your whole hard drive, then I'd recommend Acronis Trueimage.

• Regular maintenance.

Use the Tron tool /u/vocatus linked below, it is fucking awesome. Know that vocatus is also the creator of the tool!

I know of <strong>Ninite</strong> that allows you to click on the list of programs they have on their site and install them into one installer. It saves time, especially when you're looking for the basics that any ordinary home user needs. (There's also some development downloads as well on their list of programs)

>Is there a program that will scan my laptop for software and then transfer and install the ones I select onto my new computer?

I do not know of any tools such as that, but i do know of one that offers a few methods of backing up. Whether that be a 7Zip compressed file, Unicode, FTP, etc. If you're interested in something like that, possibly Cobian Backup would do the task.

Backing up your games on Steam should be easy. All you'll need is to copy the SteamApps folder and transfer it over. You'll want to go over to the Steam FAQ page about this:

• <strong>Moving a Steam Installation and games</strong>

Shouldn't need a partition just for that. Check out Cobian Backup or SyncToy. You can set them both up with folder systems.

Get data corruption on disk0 and it will spread to disk1, let that bitch crash/bsod/reboot on you with bad data on both drives and you will learn that raid1 is absolutely TERRIBLE for redundancy, its nice for lazy redundancy when you have at $10k server filled with drives that sits in an overall infrastructure with external backup solutions in place, but thats IT.

Get two drives the same size for your data drives, use Cobian Backup to backup the data to the second drive on a scheduled term, it can save the day even if you lose a day or even a week of data, which isn't bad at all on a home server.

The term you are looking for is called incremental backup. Most backup software does that. Another software to look at is http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

Yes there are in fact many backup tools that do this. What you are looking for are backup software that supports incremental backups, these will first check what files are in the backup and then check what files are on the PC and then only copy the files missing from the backups as well as overwrite files that have been updated like excel or word files etc.

Some well known backup software that supports incremental backups include:

http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

https://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html (Syncback FREE very powerful)

Now I understand if the tools above might be a bit daunting to use. So there are very easy to use alternatives and perhaps the most well known is Microsoft's own SyncToy ver 2.1. Its quite easy to use and has a very useful help file.

I'm not sure why you would want to do this. But you can use a Windows Service called Volume Shadow Copy to copy stuff while it's in use. It will take a snapshot and copy the current state, so you also don't get a mess with different files being from a different time. I'm on my phone right now so I can't be arsed to type out the command line way but there is a free backup software that also uses this with a simple GUI. http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm Just add a task to copy Eve to wherever you want to copy it and run the task manually.

I've been using Cobian Backup for years and love it. It still works on Win8 and Win10 but check the FAQ to make sure it installs properly.

The only trouble is that it does not run your backups when the computer is in Sleep mode. I describe a work-around specifically for this.

I recommend Cobian Backup http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm for this job. It's entirely free and does make unintended leveled incremental backups. Many others do this only in the paid version.

I use 2 pieces of free software to do backups in Windows 10, as I don't find the built-in options to be all that great.

Macrium Reflect - This allows you to image partitions, so you can create a compressed, bit for bit copy of a drive. You can use this to restore your system to the exact state it was in when the image was created, including restoring it to a new HDD or SSD if you ever need to replace your drive for any reason. You can also mount images created with Reflect and pull individual files and folders out of them. Windows 10 has imaging built into it, but Reflect has more features, is faster, and in my experience, is more reliable (at least compared to the imaging in Windows 8.1).

Cobian Backup - I use this for standard file/folder backups. It's packed full of features for a free program.

I have 2 drives in my PC - a small SSD for Windows and software and a large HDD for personal data. I use Reflect to make an image of my SSD on the HDD, then I use Cobian to backup the HDD to an external drive.

If you have them on the same network, then try Cobian Backup. I set it up for a friend. The program can run on either laptop or desktop, and over the network it will create an image wherever you choose. You can make it automatic and work in the background. It creates an image and then incremental or differential backups as frequently as you like (I set it up as: new image every month, with daily differential backups).

Cobian Backup is a powerful, free utility for backing up your files.

Do you want to backup your hard drive (full image, including programs) or just your files?

CloneZilla if you want to clone one drive to another. If you actually want to mirror the data:

Cobian Backup has a mirror feature:

http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

Or, you could use RoboCopy (with /mir switch) from the command line:

http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

I've heard good things about cobian backup but I haven't been using it for long enough to know how it compares to other solutions. It does seem to have the features you are looking for though.

Anyone else want to weigh in on this?

Does not look like they have a proper backup plan anyway

A proper backup is

1. Always 3 copies, verified
2. 1 copy should be offsite
3. 1 copy should be cold storage if possible, the cold storage and offsite can be the same copy
4. should have some kind of Version/Time Machine capability

As another user mentioned, if you want to stick with a basic windows GUI app, I have had good luck with Cobian Backup, that does not resolve all 4 of my items above but it will probably give you more compression options, and the ability time stamp backups.

Crash Plan also has a nice GUI interface that allows for Local Backups, as well as using their Cloud Backup service... Local Backups from the software are Free, using the Cloud Service as a monthly cost for storage, I would highly recommend looking in to CrashPlanPro service.

Cobian Backup can do incremental backup with any compression....just straight file copy.

http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

Also, Windows Backup saves the data in a .VHDX file (virtual hard disk). You can mount this file to a drive letter in Disk Management and browse the files.

This is what I would do, disk imaging of the server, and the workstations, for backups. Acronis True Image will work well for that task. How often is up to you. How often does key data change on the workstations? Daily? Weekly? The server probably doesn't change software/config often, but something should be used to do nightly backups, maybe Cobian Backup, or just do daily True Image on differential. Look at how much space is being used on each workstation and the server, add it up, quadruple it, and get a drive of at least that size, but not smaller than 1TB. Add that to the server, backup all the systems to that drive, configure to keep multiple copies of the backups if space allows (or get a bigger drive for more copies). Add an external hard drive of the same size, set up a nightly task to sync the contents of the backup drive to the external drive. You can even get another external drive and swap them out weekly or whenever so that you have an offsite copy.

I don't see the need for SSD, unless you're on a gigabit network and every PC is new, which we know they aren't nor is that server.

You can sure put the backups on a NAS, it'll just cost more.

As someone who has spent a lot of time trying to find the best, easiest free option, I currently think AOMEI Backupper is the best. I used to recommend Cobian, but he's ~~trying to sell it~~ sold it and I don't know if it will continue to be free after that.

I use Cobian Backup for file backups. For full system backups, I use Acronis True Image. It has never failed me.

Why do it manually? Get something like Cobian Backup, or Novabackup and automate it.

I personally do whole drive backups with Acronis TrueImage, because I have the hard drive space to back it all up, and if Windows crashes I can restore it all without reinstalling all the programs.

I also have a cloud backup account for extra safety on things like family photos.

You can use the software called Cobian Backup. It's free for personal use has a lot more options than you might need but it's not bloated.
http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

Another option is called SyncBack you will only need the free version. http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/syncback-hub.html

>how I know it's backing up what I want it to

Win7 Backup works fine, but you really never know your backup is good until you test a file restore. Do a test restore, if you want to be sure.

Also, Win7 Backup creates a compressed file containing your backup in standard .VHD (virtual hard disk) format. You can go to Disk Manager and mount the .VHD file as a drive letter to view the contents.

http://www.7tutorials.com/disk-management-how-mount-and-unmount-vhd-images

If you want an alternative backup program, Cobian Backup runs as a service in the background, and will do a backup with standard file copy.

http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

It will depend on the motherboard you have. In reality the onboard controllers are crap dealing with RAID setups, I have relied on it once and it failed on me I lost shitloads of data on a RAID5 setup with 3 drives.

You can do the mirroring using windows but that's software RAID and it's less than recommended. What I would do in your case if you just want redundancy in case one of the drives fail. Format both to NTFS and setup Cobian backup (http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm) to copy new files to the other drive on a specific schedule, once a day or overnight...