Hard Disk Backups

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PaulZ
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Hard Disk Backups

Post by PaulZ »

For many years I have been a happy user of System Guardian, by DuoCor. The product backs up all changed files and can restore files and folders on demand. I back up files to a second internal hard drive.

A couple days ago I tried to restore a file and found that some files and folders have not been getting backed up. I have no idea how long it has not been working as I seldom have a need to restore a file. In any case I have tried all the tricks I know:
1. manually forcing file, folder and complete backups
2. running chkdsk on the backup drive in case there were problems with the drive
3. uninstalling and reinstalling the software.

DuoCor seems to be out of business. Although their web site still exists, emails are bounced as domain name not recognized (duocor.com), their 800 number has a weird message and their direct dial number is out of service.

I'm out of ideas.

Anybody in the forum use System Guardian and have suggestions for fixing the problem or contacting DuoCor or some successor company?

Anybody in the forum that can recommend an alternative product for routine automated backups of an entire hard disk? I want to only backup changed files. I want to be able to selectively restore individual files or entire folders.

I'm using Windows XP Home, with SP3 and all critical patches installed.

Thanks in advance.
sluggo
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Post by sluggo »

babelproofreader
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Post by babelproofreader »

Roscoe
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Post by Roscoe »

Hi PaulZ!

I am starting to think that having a backup to the cloud makes a lot of sense. I manually encrypt and upload my trading systems and tools to some space on my ISP's server as well as a free Yahoo e-mail account, but that is only when I think that I need to do it.

My only reservation with the cloud part is encryption, I am not keen to have my data out of my control unless it is encrypted before it leaves here. EDIT: CrashPlan has Blowfish encryption so no problem there.

Now, to decide on a combination of cloud and physical backup choices.
Roscoe
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Post by Roscoe »

Anyone using this? http://www.fssdev.com/ - it looks like it does what System Guardian used to do.
fab1usa1
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Post by fab1usa1 »

For what it's worth, I use Macrium Reflect (192-bit AES encryption) to backup my laptop to my home-based file server (1TB Seagate GoFlex). Any changes to TB systems I then copy to my production environment at Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). I schedule a weekly "snapshot" of my EC2 instance which persists it to AWS storage. The snapshot includes the TradingBlox folder and CSI UnfairAdvantage.

My TB systems and data exist over four systems: laptop, home file server, EC2 instance, and AWS storage. In the past year there was one instance where I made a dreadful mistake and had to restore from the file server using Macrium. It worked perfectly.
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