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 Post subject: How to Test a Backup
 Post Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 7:44 pm 
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I perform many weekly backups of my hard drive using Acronis, Macrium & Windows. But I have never had reason to perform a restore or recovery because my drive has never failed. I remember Pete telling me that I should always test my backups to make sure they worked. But I could never bring myself to crash a perfectly good drive to test a backup.

Question 1
So how does one test a system image backup?

Question 2
Let's say I had an older computer that I didn't mind crashing and restoring for the sake of practice. How do I crash this system after first creating a recovery system disk?

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 Post subject: Re: How to Test a Backup
 Post Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 8:39 pm 
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The only true way to test an image backup is to do an actual restore. You don't have to crash the drive to do this, you just do it. Personally I find this sort of test a waste of time as it does not prove that the next backup is going to work.

Really it is just a leap of faith just like your system security. Either you trust the software or you don't. Doing backups with different software on different destinations improves your chances but is still no proof.

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 Post subject: Re: How to Test a Backup
 Post Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 8:45 pm 
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As usual, you comments make sense.........thanks.

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 Post subject: Re: How to Test a Backup
 Post Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 11:21 pm 
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bbarry wrote:
As usual, you comments make sense.........thanks.

Not sure if this is available with the boot media but may be... At least Acronis DOES have a validation option for checking an image but I believe that this only checks the structure of the backup to make sure that Acronis can read. I have never bothered with it. I feel safe in that, with my different destinations and two different backup software, something is bound to work. Then, on my main, I also do a bootable clone.

I use two backups, Acronis and Windows imaging, going to different destination drives and I feel more than covered. You add even another in Macrium so you have three different restore options. I guess, if you include my clone drive, we are equal with three different options. Don't worry about it. ;)

Also I'm confident that you also have separate backups of your data such as documents and pictures. The very worst possibility is that none of the backups work which is fairly close to a null possibility and you do a clean install. Other than time what is really the big deal with this. Yes, it is a pain installing stuff again but, I think, it is really just the time it takes that bothers. As long as you have your data that is all that really matters. I don't anymore but I used to do a clean install about every 6 months just to clean things out. Quit doing that with either Windows 7 or 8.1, can't remember. The point is that, as long as your data is all there, even a clean install is not all that big of a deal... Not really any different than setting up a virtual machine.

BTW, When I say data backup I mean all of it. Remember that your email store is also data. I relocated my email store to my data drive. My data drive is clone/synced to three other systems and external storage. Favorites, cookies and such for your browser are also data. Only takes a moment to export such things in case later needed. Save the exports to a drive that gets backed up as data. Not doing little things like this end up causing a lot of the frustration involved with a clean install.

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 Post subject: Re: How to Test a Backup
 Post Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2021 9:51 am 
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All good advice, Jay. I couldn't agree with you more about the importance of saving data files. And again, there I am almost in an 'overkill' mode.

Most of my data (documents, spreadsheets, pictures, etc.) is saved as I generate it; for example, all my Word documents are saved in Documents/Word Files. And then I also immediately copy (save) the file to a little USB flash drive that I always have inserted. And all this data is saved when I do my backups. I also use File History and SyncToy to save my data files.

The data that has to be exported (e.g., favorites, cookies, contacts, emails, etc.)......I do this exporting on a end-of-month basis to two external hard drives.

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