My sincere thanks to all for contributing to a great discussion, and (selfishly) for making me think harder about what and how I want to backup.

Interestingly, I looked up prices for Drobo and they weren't too more expensive than what I have designed for the hardware component of my backup 'solution': an Areca RAID controller card and 4 x 2TB drives.

Steve

I also use Acronis True Image and have found it to be extremely reliable.

As previously mentioned, there are several reasons for, and types of, backup.

The beauty of Acronis is that you get full disaster recovery (saved my bacon on several occasions!) as well as file backup.

Using the full drive/partition image, you still have access to individual files, which can be restored individually without having to do a full restore. I usually do a full image after any major changes and differential backups inbetween. (I really, really, really hate having to restore all the programmes and settings after a system crash/HDD failure).

I far prefer to just whack in a new drive and restore the image and last differential and be back up-and-running exactly where I was before the disaster in a matter of acouple of hours rather than several days re-installing/reconfiguring, thank you very much.

I have tried many backup programs - as I have the business continuity responsibility for my wife's business it is a very high priority for it to be reliable as loss of data equals out of business.

You get what you pay for with free software most of the time (as we're all familiar with some free A/V tools which are pretty good - this is unusual). No free backup tool I have ever used has been worth the time to test it and the low cost ones have been worse than no backup at all by corrupting things.

Testing includes running huge backups (100 GBytes+, 100K+ files etc) and then RESTORING IT. Testing also includes interrupting the backup and restore tests with power failures and other system crashes. If it can't recover from that with a good backup and/or restore it fails. I bought a giant external hard drive just to test backup software with.

After years of testing my solution is Retrospect for data backup. I paid a reasonable amount of money for it and also bought a support contract for the first few years I used it. I backup to 2 separate hard drives on alternate days and every so often everything goes to a set of DVD-R's. Retrospect can copy an existing backup to DVD-R for you also. It has many powerful features and recovers from crashes etc. It does have a learning curve. I used tape years ago and Retrospect also supports every tape drive out there.

I have a 3rd backup to a 3rd hd that just uses a utility that copies the files over every day. As you can see I'm pretty careful about it - it's saved me more than once.

For system/application backup I use Acronis. It is not bug free (what is?) but as was mentioned above, it you make the verification part of the backup process you have a good backup. I also bought a support contract for it the first few years I used it.

I have used it several times successfully, including one time with "Universal Restore" which allows you to restore to different hardware than you backed up from. It will allow you to load new drivers for your motherboard during the restore process. Normally it would take me a week or more nearly full time to reinstall windows, set it up the way I like, and reinstall all of my wife's applications. With Universal restore I built her a new PC from scratch and had EVERYTHING up an running in less than 24 hours - not full time either.

I just installed my new 6TB RAID 5 array, destined as a backup for my other RAIDs and C: volume, in Vista 64 Ultimate. I had to designate it as a GPT volume to allow the > 2TB size. Apparently, GPT volumes presented intractable issues for previous versions of Acronis TIH. Not so with TIH 2010.

After reading the posts above and many other reviews on Acronis and other imaging and file backup software, I installed and am now using Acronis True Image Home 2010. Within a few days (as work allows!), I'm going to do a clean install of Win 7. For now, I've backed up all of my volumes, made a bootable rescue DVD, confirmed that I can access and backup my system from its backup image, and confirmed that I can mount images of all of my media drives and access individual files. NICE! Flawless performance.

I was really worried after reading the Acronis forums about isolated horror stories of failed installations, botched images, etc. But, as is the case with many user forums, folks generally post their problems, not their satisfactory experiences. We'll see how things go with Acronis in Win 7.

Steve

I concur with bastinato. Retrospect is absolutely awesome for file backups. On my 750G drive, I've got a year of backups of my 750G data drive, because Retrospect is really good about keeping multiple old versions of data files, so only needs a full backup the first time it's run. For bare metal restores, however, it's weak. A new version (7.7) is due out in November that revamps the current lousy bare metal restore process, and it's supposed to be the cat's meow.

Meanwhile, Windows 7 Ultimate's built in backup program seems light years ahead of any previous versions of Win backup. I toyed with a system backup but haven't tested a bare metal restore with it yet.

Bob.

I did use the Win7 drive C imaging system - after making the mistake of doing a clean install of Win 7 64bit by using an upgrade version of the Win7 installation DVD, 20 days later I couldn't activate Win7 - the error prompt said that I could only UPGRADE, not do a clean install (I presumed it would merely ask me to insert the Win2000 disk for proof that I had a previous legal copy of Windows - like all the other Win upgrades over the years). Yikes! after 20 days of work installing and fine tuning all my software! I tried too many attempted solutions to describe here, but I did finally get it activated without having to re-install everything, by:

a) using the Win7 install disk to "repair" my installation after messing up my previous installation, and choosing to replace the OS with an image that I had made just 2 days ago after I finished installing programs. These images are easy to make within Win7 - just click Start and type "backup" and choose "backup my computer."

b) after getting back to where I was a couple of days ago, I then put my installation DVD back into the drive and this time I chose to install an "upgrade." Normally, that would be to upgrade from Vista (you can't upgrade from XP), but it worked!

After upgrading Win 7 64-bit to Win 7 64-bit, I was able to activate, no problem. And all my programs and settings were exactly as I left them 2 days ago.

Having had success with the windows-created images (twice, actually), I think I'll stick with these for system restore in Win 7.

As for backing up other files, I use the ancient Sychronize It to back up each of my work disks to exact duplicates that I run on USB cables going to disks that I keep in a cheap Walmart firesafe. The only quirk I've encountered so far with Synchronize It is that its registration doesn't hold - but it works almost as well in the free mode as in the paid-for registered mode. Perhaps Synchronize it will have a new version soon that will solve the registration problem (http://www.synchronizeit.com/).