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What is the best laptop backup software?

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by thomascarlson6484524

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About a month ago one of our employees had thier laptop stolen. It was not until that happened did I realize the importance of having out laptops backed up. I've been searching the internet for a way to do this. Does anyone know a good way to do this? Seems the more I research the more confused I get about it.

Thanks for your help

Tom

8 replies

by nicknielsen

Your in-house IT or regular source of IT support should be helping you make this choice.

Are the laptops periodically back in the main office? If so, you can take an image with Ghost or other drive cloning software. If the laptops are distributed to remote users, you will have to rely on the users to make the backups. (Your IT can most likely come up with a reliable method for users to back up their own laptops.)

My personal choice is to take a full image of my hard drive every month, with incremental backups taken at least weekly, more often if necessary.

I've listed some commercial backup and imaging software below. All are effective and reasonably economical, but require different approaches to implement.

Acronis TrueImage - http://www.acronis.com/
Symantec Ghost - http://www.symantec.com/themes/ghost/index.jsp
Winzip - http://www.winzip.com/index.htm
WinRar - http://www.rarlab.com/

There are also Open Source backup and imaging solutions, but I'm not familiar enough with them to make recommendations.

by vhargis

If this is a good backup system I'm willing to try it out. I lost my laptop on my last trip and am still trying to recover lost documents. I was taking an image of it every couple of weeks but as most of you know 2 weeks of information is almost impossible to recreate without a good backup system.

I can not have the backup take too long or take my computer over time is too critical in my business. I'll review this product as a possibility to make my life run smoother.

by vhargis

Can you give me a short description of each of these three products? I realize you work for Druvaa but as your competitors Ironmountan Connected and EMC Avamar are good products too. What is the major difference between these products? Are these products for different levels of organizations? Can you sum up the most important selling point for each? It is confusing to choose the best software. And I do not want to make the wrong decision and regret it for a long time.

by pauljacobs

Thanks for your reply.

You can find the product comparison on the website at - http://www.druvaa.com/documents/Druvaa_inSync_Product_Comparision.xls

There are other benchmark studies and white-papers on the website - http://www.druvaa.com/products/insync_docs.html

In Brief, the product has some unique features not offered by any of the other products (at least, to the best of my knowledge) -

1. Backup over WAN for remote users.
2. WAN Optimization - for faster backup over WAN
3. Data de-duplication - saves single copy of duplicate emails and documents. This saves over 90% backup time, bandwidth and storage
4. Maintains near infinite restore points
5. Search your files in restore (available in v3)
6. Browser based restore when user not on PC.

Paul
(part of Druvaa Team)

by michael jay

Your enterprise should also look at backing up on site desktops as well, critical data can be lost in a heartbeat when a hard drive takes a dive.

To confuse you further, my shop uses Atempo, just another choice, as there are many.
http://www.atempo.com/

by neon samurai

We're using Ironkeys and encrypted notebooks. With VPN and the network shares, there should be no user work on the notebook anyhow. If one walks away, the backup is continuing to work from the network shared storage while Outlook on the new machine synchronizes with the exchange server.

The ideal would be having each workstation independent of the hardware by having a good backup and recovery policy in place. My own goal is to be able to whipe and reimage any notebook or workstation in the company on a whim without worrying about user data being lost. It's probably going to be a mix of user work habits and Backula or a similar enterprise backup solution. The tech is easy but the user habits will take some time to social engineer.

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