What is your backup solution?

I’ve gone from having no backup solution to obsessing about backup to today where I’ve greatly simplified my back strategy. Here is my setup:

#1 Drive 250 GB Internal for Windows XP and Programs

#2 Drive 250 GB Internal for Data (Music, Pictures, Video, Office files, etc)

#3 Drive 250 GB External NAS (Copy of #2 using NTI Shadow)

You’ll immediately notice my weak link to this strategy: If drive #1 goes down, I will have to reinstall Windows and all my programs. Over the years, I’ve found that having to reinstall Windows isn’t that bad and is needed at times. The pain in the butt comes from having to reinstall all my programs and then configure and customize them.  

So to save time I use a software imaging product called Acronis True Image. I take two images: One base image with only Windows XP, service packs and driver installed. And another image each month or so with all my programs installed. If you make a lot of changes to your machine you can set Acronis to take an nightly/weekly incremental backup. I save the images to drive #2.

This solution has worked well for me. I have two more machines on our home network and it’s nice to have the NAS drive online at all times. This backup strategy isn’t the perfect solution, but it does provide a good level of protection for those files that would be difficult or impossible to replace. I used to partition one drive so that no installed programs would reside on the same partition as Windows. But I found that some programs gave me problems or wouldn’t uninstall properly.

Notes: I create a My Documents folder on drive #2 instead of saving items to the desktop My Documents. I also setup Outlook so that its .PST file resides on drive #2. Some programs insist on placing files in My Documents so I’ll occasionally check this folder and copy it over to drive #2.