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Marc, as a system - differential and incremental backing up makes sense, but I think for Leon, Cloning is a good way to go.
Its a very simple thing to do and its even simpler to get back up and running.
Ghosting is also a good idea.
It doesnt take long and he will always be able to start from scratch
Nothing worse than getting all your incremental backup versions mixed up
At some point in the future you always need to do a new seed and in the event of a total failure you often dont have your tools or anything to start with (the PC is down) - so getting started can be a Catch22, although that can be the case with anything - but swapping out a cloned HDD should mean you are up and running in the time it takes to install the replacement hard drive.
Leon, Id buy yourself one of the external HDD drive adapters I put the link in your previous thread.
If you can try and buy the identical drive that is already in your PC, it actually isnt critical, but it does make life easier.
This way you just plug in a new OEM hard drive straight out of the packet, clone it and put it back in its packet (appropriately labelled of course)
Maybe have two of them and alternate backups every so often.
Getting a Time Capsule or some other sort of automated file backup system might also be worthwhile - just select all the data or folders you want to backup
The disadvantage is that if you rely on all the applications saving files to their favourite places - then you have data scattered all over the place, whereas if you name a new folder Data and then created some subfolders for each type of Data file you are likely to use and then backing up Data is simply a case of saving "Data" with subfolders.
But it requires diligence to and a few changes to default file settings to make this work best.
Happy to lisetn to other peoples ideas but this keeps it (relatively) simple, especially the recovery side of things.
Rally
PS Stating the obvious here :
But . . . a caveat and Warning anyway
Cloning, copies a drives entire disc contents (effectively sector by sector) to another drive - if you accidentally mix up the source and destination then you will destroy your data drive forever !
Be very slow and very careful when selecting which drive is which in the software - keep you finger off the keyboard until you are sure you know what you are doing !!!
In this regard cloning is not fool proof !
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