17 May 2012

Nerds: help!

Who has read the previous post understands my mind is on back-ups these days. My computer runs some back-up program of which I hope it backs up new files onto my external hard drive. And my newest drive should do that too, using its own software. Time to have a look if they really do.

And now I'm confused. The new disk doesn't back up at all; I think I'll re-install the software. Hopefully that helps. Having a look at the older drive got me really puzzled: it seems to back everything up. Every day. Sounds a bit superfluous. And maybe not true! I had a look at how big the "autobackup" folder is; it's bigger than the whole drive, which isn't anywhere near full! I don't understand. Can anyone explain? And can anyone recommend any package that backs stuff up reliably and understandably? It would be greatly appreciated...

A terabyte in back-up files! That's a lot...


But hang on; where is that terabyte? Not here, apparently...

2 comments:

Blerik said...

Nero uses a technique called incremental backup. It keeps a full backup, and after that, for all newer backups, it only stores the differences to the full backup. Since the changes are usually small, this allows the software to keep more backups on the disk. Nero likes to show off how good a job it did by showing you the full sizes for all backups it keeps, even though it doesn't have all that data on disk.

When you request one of the newer backups, it combines it with the older full backup to get you your data back.

Here are some links for you:
http://www.nero.com/eng/support-faq.html?s=sub&t=backup (in 'What is the difference between the types of backups supported?')
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_backup

Margot said...

Ah! The upper-nerd has responded! Thanks Blerik. That makes sense! Though I think Nero are a bunch of scallywags for pretending they have 1TB on my disk...