Oddbean new post about login | logout Left the laptop on overnight to finish the backup of Windows. Woke up 3am; it had finished so I turned it off, forgetting the drive was still attached. Morning: panic - would the drive be recognised when I turned the laptop on? Yes, thank God it was still there. Then I saw (in contents) I had ALREADY done a backup of Windows, couple of months previously!! Now I had 2 copies of it taking up GB of space. Could have saved myself the time and effort by simply updating the previous backup!! DUH.
@bade302b it is a good idea investing on a decently-sized hard disk, have it permanently attached and just activate Windows' incremental backup. It updates hourly with the last changes. A yearly full backup is also a very good investment, given HD prices: make backup, put it in a safe place, refresh yearly (either make another backup or, if paranoid and want to keep the yearly backup, copy to another HD and reyse the old one).
@bade302b if you only make random backups months apart then you are putting your data at risk! I have regular scheduled backups that run several times a week to different storage destinations. Unfortunately I see too many PCs where they have no backups at all with all the extra work needed to recover from any disk issue, bad update, virus etc!