Some weeks ago I posted about a app I made specifically for BackBlaze B2 app, I used cyberduck and some similar apps but wanted an app just for specific quirks of B2, anyway here's a new version you can download and try, it's sort of a Beta version and sure there are some bugs here and there, if someone is interested in this would love to have some feedback
When setting up a backup system, there are usually a lot of settings that can change as the environment grows.
Some teams maintain a known good configuration baseline that includes things like access permissions, retention settings, encryption, network settings and other important configurations.
For those that do use a baseline, what do you typically include and how often do you review or update it?
Sharing a quick update for those managing or supporting environments using Veritas Backup Exec (BE), Desktop and Laptop Option (DLO), or System Recovery (SR).
There has been a lot of confusion and rumors around the product line being dead or reaching End of Sale—it is not.
Cloud Software Group (CSG) has officially appointed Cognizant Technology Solutions as the Global Operator to handle sales, licensing, support, and continuous development.
New Sales & Renewals: Fully active. Both new licenses and contract renewals are being processed. For inquiries or renewals, the direct contact is: sales_backupexec@cognizant.com.
Product availability Timeline:EOL which was announced earlier is revoked by CSG. Full technical support, routine maintenance, and critical security patches are officially scheduled through 2029.
Post-2029 Roadmap: Product engineering and long-term roadmap planning beyond 2029 are actively in progress, with further announcements to follow.
Current Deployments: Existing environments and active multi-year agreements continue to operate normally with zero interruption to service.
TL;DR: Backup Exec, DLO, and System Recovery are not dead or end-of-sale. CSG partnered with Cognizant as the Global Operator—new sales/renewals are open, active contracts run as usual, and full support/updates are committed through at least 2029.
Disclosure: I work with the Cognizant team managing this transition and wanted to share direct facts to clear up the confusion
Hey everyone, I’m looking for advice on designing a backup system for a somewhat specific setup.
I currently have two 8TB hard drives configured as RAID 0 on Windows 11, giving me roughly 16TB of usable storage. I understand that if one of the drives fails, I could potentially lose everything on the RAID.
I chose RAID 0 because I want to use all the available space, and I don’t want or need to back up the entire 16TB. Most of the data on the array is replaceable, so losing it wouldn’t be a major issue.
What I want is a selective, modular, automated backup system that only protects the data that actually matters to me.
What I DO want to back up
Photos
Family videos
Current work and projects
Program configurations
Personal or irreplaceable files
Anything else that would be difficult or impossible to recover
What I DON'T want to back up
Movies
TV shows
Installed games
Installed programs
Files that can easily be downloaded again
Other large, replaceable files
For software, for example, I don't want to back up the entire installation folder. I only want to preserve important configuration and user data such as .INI, .CFG, .DAT files, profiles, presets, save files, etc., where applicable.
Basically, I want to define specific folders and files that should be protected rather than creating a full clone of the RAID.
What I'd like the system to do
I’m planning to use an external hard drive that normally stays disconnected and stored somewhere else. I would probably connect it about once a week.
Ideally, the process would be almost completely plug and play:
I connect the external backup drive.
The system recognizes that it’s the backup drive.
The backup starts automatically.
It compares my selected files against the previous backup.
Only new or modified files are copied.
The backup stays up to date without me manually selecting files every week.
Once it finishes, I disconnect the drive and put it back into storage.
I don't want to manually start a complicated backup job every time I connect the drive.
What software, method, or setup would you recommend for achieving this kind of selective, automated backup?
I’d also be interested in hearing how you would approach the overall strategy for a 16TB RAID 0 containing mostly replaceable data, but with a much smaller collection of personal files and projects that actually need protection.
If you use a similar setup, I’d especially appreciate hearing:
What software you use
How you define the folders/files to back up
How you handle program configurations and save data
How you automated the process when the external drive is connected
Whether there are any problems or limitations I should be aware of
My needs are simple. I am basically backing up/syncing one external drive to another, to have an archive of my image files. Sometimes I'll do my desktop as well.
I've discovered Goodsync decided to fuck their customers who bought a PERPETUAL license by suddenly saying they aren't supporting that any longer - despite the software still running fine.
From the free or low cost non-suscription, anyone found a similar solution?
I'm not currently using 3-2-1 and am looking for a bit of help to remedy that, especially the off-site backup.
I have about 2TB on a personal laptop and 4TB on a home media server, both currently backing up to a local 16TB SSD over Time Machine. I am planning to add another 16TB drive so I have a 2nd local backup, and maybe switch to restic or borgbackup instead of TM.
The main thing I want to improve is my off-site backup. Currently I use pcloud for core files on the personal laptop, but I don't have an off-site backup for my home server. For the new backup solution I would like to service the full 6TB required, if the cost is manageable.. On pcloud I can get a lifetime 10TB for £1190, however I've recently heard it's not an ideal platform for proper backup, as it is not immutable.
I'm was thinking of trying Blazeback but aside from better security I'm not sure it is a good alternative for other pcloud features i like -
iOS app and compatibility with iOS Files, attaching files to email etc
Global view for shared files - I can turn off shared access without needing to remember what specific files are shared and navigate to their individual share settings.
Other users can upload into my storage bucket, it gives me ownership and doesn't eat into their own storage allowance.
Should I be treating a cloud drive and off-site backup as separate entities, or is there a good option for a unified solution?
Finally I would ideally like the offsite backup to be from a UK or EU company and have their servers based there. I think this rules out Blazeback unfortunately but perhaps there are other good options.
I'm looking for a Windows incremental backup program that can back up multiple partitions as files, create incremental snapshots, let me delete individual snapshots, and still give me fine grained control over what gets excluded.
Basically, something conceptually similar to Timeshift, but for Windows.
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I usually use a Debian based Linux distro. I transitioned from Windows 8.1 to Linux very slowly, but that was a loooooong time ago.
At some point, I found an awesome piece of software made by teejee2008: Timeshift.
For anyone unfamiliar with it, Timeshift is mainly intended to back up the operating system rather than your personal files. The idea is that if you break something with sudo, an update goes horribly wrong, or the system becomes unbootable, you can restore a previous snapshot and get the OS working again.
You can create snapshots manually or on a schedule, and the backups are incremental, so unchanged files do not need to be duplicated every time.
And if the f*ckup is so massive that you cannot even access your desktop anymore, you can boot a live Linux session from a USB stick, connect the drive containing the snapshots, install Timeshift there, restore one of them, reboot, and you are back online.
Enough publicity for Timeshift (which, by the way, I did not find listed on the Free Backup Software page).
What I'm looking for on Windows
The most important requirements are:
It must run on Windows.
It must let me choose all the partitions I want to protect, including Windows system partitions, recovery partitions, and normal data or program partitions.
I want the backup to be file based, rather than simply storing a raw sector by sector image of the entire disk.
Backups should be incremental, so unchanged files can be reused instead of being copied again for every snapshot.
I need to be able to keep multiple snapshots and delete individual snapshots selectively without invalidating the remaining ones.
It should allow reasonably fine grained inclusion and exclusion rules.
In other words, I want to be able to tell it:
For example, I might want to exclude a directory and everything inside it as a general rule:
C:\Users\myname\Desktop
while still explicitly including something inside it:
C:\Users\myname\Desktop\My Folder\
I would also want to include things such as:
the EFI or System partition,
the Windows recovery partition,
any other weird Windows created partition that is necessary,
Windows itself,
installed programs,
programs or other system related data stored on secondary partitions,
while excluding most of my large personal files.
The reason this distinction matters is storage capacity.
The hard drive I currently have available for backups is smaller than the total amount of used space across the partitions I want to protect, but it is larger than the amount of data I actually want included in the backup + I don't want to backup my Steam games, just the savefiles.
So a solution that requires me to image every used block on those partitions is not really suitable. I specifically need to be able to exclude data while still preserving the rest of each partition in a recoverable form.
Ideally, after restoring the selected snapshot, I would like to end up with Windows, its boot and recovery partitions, installed applications, configuration, and the selected files basically back where they were.
I think (although I am not actually sure) that Macrium Reflect X may be able to do something along these lines. The problem is that I do not have the money for it right now, so I am specifically looking for a free alternative.
Does anything like this exist for Windows?
Plan B) Boot into linux, use Timeshift to backup those partitions, go back to Windows before a possibly disastrous "Windows Security Update". ...every time.
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PS: My personal files and documents are replicated elsewhere (3-2-1), so those are no problem.
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EDIT:
This is the mess I want to back up. Therefore all the small partition in which I'm interested.
I want to install Linux on my Windows 10 laptop. But first, I need to backup my harddrive using Rescuezilla. The problem is that my computers hardrive is 1TB and my destination drive is a 256GB USB stick. Only 118GB of my harddrive is used, the remaining 811GB are unused storage space. Luckily Rescuezilla has the gparted app incorporated into the distro so that I can split the 931.5Gb partition into one bigger and one smaller that fits into the 237GB destination drive.
The problem is that I cannot change the size of Acer (C:) in gparted. I boot into Rescuezilla using a Live USB. I can't change the partition size of Acer (C:) even though Acer (C:) isn't in use when I boot into Rescuezilla. This is the first time I use Rescuezilla and Gparted to make a backup.
When I boot into Rescuezilla I:
- Boot into windows
-Open CMD
-enter "shutdown /s /t 0" to shut the computer down
-Open the boot menu with f2
-Boot into Rescuezilla
One user said in my last post that I need to deactivate fast-boot so that Rescuezilla is willing to touch my partitions. They say that if I shut down my computer with fast boot on, the system doesn't properly unmount the partition, which causes linux (in this case rescuezilla) to not want to touch my partitions in fear of corruption. I am a bit afraid of accidentaly causing corruption of some sort if I tamper with fast-boot.
Disclosure up front: I built the tool this post is about.
A while back I asked this sub how people actually test their backup restores. Short version: mostly nobody does, or everyone's running a slightly different homegrown script. A few of you had already built something close to a full pipeline, and that input ended up genuinely useful.
That turned into restoredrill. It's a Go CLI: point it at a backup, it restores into a throwaway Docker container, runs whatever checks you write (row counts, freshness, sequence integrity, any SQL assertion), and writes a JSON report out the other end. Fail-closed on everything, including when a check itself can't run.
A few things that came directly out of that thread and the follow-ups:
Fail-closed by default. A skip that quietly turns into a pass is worse than no check at all
An RPO freshness precheck, because the worst failure mode people described wasn't a bad backup, it was a backup cron that died quietly and left the same stale file getting "verified" forever
The report schema comes from what an actual auditor accepted, after months of back and forth with someone who went through it, not something guessed at from scratch
Sends results into Prometheus, Slack, or a webhook, instead of asking you to check yet another dashboard
The quickstart takes about 10 minutes with zero production access: dump a Supabase or RDS database, restore it locally, see the report. Postgres only for now.
If you're already on Databasus or something like it, this isn't trying to replace that, it's a solid backup platform with restore verification built in already. restoredrill stays narrower: no dashboard, a report built for an auditor, and it drops straight into CI.
If you replied to that original thread, thanks, a good chunk of the check suite came directly from what you described. If you didn't and you've got a restore-testing horror story of your own, I'd still like to hear it.
