Re:Acronis True Image and others...
2011/09/05 12:16:11
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The Acronis program can be run two ways ... from the HDD ... or from a bootable CD. It installs all kinds of stuff on your HDD so I always just run it from a CD when I create and restore an image. The CD version doesn't have all the features like a full install does, such as you can't mount ISO's, you can't schedule backups, and other things. But on a DAW, you don't want any of that stuff anyway.
As for the image Acronis makes ... that's going to be as big as the space occupied on your HDD. So if you have a 300GB HDD and only 120GB is used, the size of the image Acronis makes will only be 120GB. And actually quite a bit less because you can choose to compress it.
Honestly, I couldn't even dream of storing anything off site because of my connection limitations ... but any connection is going to be slow when your talking the size of HDD's now days. Even streaming video at it's highest resolution can only be a few GB's ... but an HDD image would normally be 100's of GB's.
Plus your ISP may start throttling you down if you start setting up your backups to upload to an offsite server on a regular basis. Sometimes you have to have a business account with your internet provider to have unlimited bandwidth to deal with files that large and it's not cheap.
What I'm going to do is, set up a network in my house. It's not hard at all especially with Windows 7, it's kind of like networking for dummies. You plug everything in, and it walks you through the steps. Then I'm going to backup everything to another PC that's set up with a RAID configuration. I'm going to use my old DAW but I need to buy some HDD's. Hell, you can get two 300GB HDD's now for a hundred bucks. What a RAID configuration is, it's multiple HDD's that all have the same data shared across them, that way if one goes bad, you just pop a replacement in and you haven't lost anything. Baps just bought one. Of course, it's onsite so you'll lose it if there's a fire or theft.
"I pulled the head off Elvis, filled Fred up to his pelvis, yaba daba do, the King is gone, and so are you."