DoctorBill wrote:
If you Back Up your system, which program is the Easiest and Most Reliable when it comes to RESTORING the system - for someone NOT a computer Professional.....like me. I just bought a 64 GB 3.0 USB SanDisk Thumbdrive for backing up.
There's lots of considerations with doing backups, and I'm convinced that there's no one "best" way to do backups. For an effective backup plan, you have to think through various recovery scenarios, and different tools and methodologies (and even media) are stronger in some areas than others.
In the context of this question, there's full image backups, full data, and application data. Full image is great if you need to do a complete restore of everything, back to the state the computer was in when you made your backup. However, those take the most time to create, and space to store, and you definitely won't be able to do that kind of backup with a thumb drive. For that, you need either an external hard drive and/or mirroring to a cloud server. Big hard drives aren't especially expensive, and I have a 5 TB drive that I got for around $120 US about 3 years ago. Full image backups are good to have if you're doing major upgrades to your system.
Data backups will get all your data, but not your system, so they won't be as useful if you have some sort of catastrophic system failure, such as failed hard drive, or a system upgrade that goes badly. If you have all your data, you still may have to reinstall your system and applications from release media, and you have to re-do all your prefs.
Since this is a Seamonkey forum, I will mention the details there more specifically.
The good news with Mozilla apps (not just Seamonkey, but Firefox and Thunderbird, as well) is that it's pretty easy to back up all your user data. In Windows, all it takes is copying the contents of %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Seamonkey to another location, whether a different folder on your local hard drive, or to another device. If you copy to a different folder, that at least protects you from accidental data damage, although for longer term, assumes that you're including that data in other backups.
What makes backups more difficult with Windows the Registry. With Mac and Linux, you can simply copy everything. With Windows, it's difficult to back up the registry and files and then reproduce a working system. As a result, it's essential to use a backup tool.
Personally, I use Duplicati for daily backups of my user data (which I write to a LAN-attached drive, where I back up all the machines in my LAN. That's a data backup and not full image, but it works for what I want it to do.
One catch to backing up Mozilla data is that as user data it's located in %APPDATA%, which is normally hidden (because it's data that's normally accessed only through an application, rather than directly, as with things like word processing docs). Thus, if you go looking for the AppData folder in your user profile with the Windows Explorer, you won't find it, unless you explicitly specify the path (C:\Users\[YourName]\Roaming) or let Windows do it for you with th %APPDATA% environment variable. I have found that trying to back up the entire user profile (including all AppData) with Duplicati often throws warnings about open files, and the entire of AppData isn't really necessary -- I only want data from two or three applications.
As for your media, I would not consider a thumb drive to be adequate as a backup drive. Besides the question of size, the nature of those drives is dynamic enough that they're not good for long-term storage, especially on a device that's frequently overwritten. A thumb drive is far better suited for use for "sneakernet" data transfers than longer-term storage. For your needs, I strongly urge you to get a device that's intended for that kind of usage, namely an external hard drive.
Also -- one other consideration. If you're making your backups to rewriteable media, make sure that new backups are not overwriting (and destroying) older backups. Many years ago, I had a machine that backed up to floppy disks (several dozen). There was a time when I was making a backup when the hard drive was in the process of failing, and when I had problems while I was backing up, the result was that neither the new backup nor the old was usable.
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