Ideas for an efficient Windows 7 Backup Plan

[Guest IT Architect]

I'm looking for ideas for an efficient backup plan.

 

Situation:

1. I have a Windows 7 Professional laptop that has a lot of data that needs to be backed up. A full backup will take ~18 hours even with an eSATA III connection.

2. Not many files change in a day.

3. A file-based backup cannot work because I have huge .VMX and PST files which change every day.

4. I didn't find anything 3rd party that makes sense other than perhaps Acronis Advanced Workstation with block-level deduplication for ~$137. However, there is no trial, and I couldn't get any commitment from them that it supports intelligent off-site backup drive rotation. That's why I'm here trolling for ideas on making the Windows 7 backup serve my purposes.

 

Windows 7 Backup:

1. I have no interest in a file-by-file backup since I can easily retrieve files from an image backup using Windows 7 Ultimate, Enterprise, or 7-Zip. I will upgrade to Ultimate if it makes sense.

2. I understand that when I do an image backup to an external USB drive formatted for NTFS, is a block-based backup, and that the first backup copies all blocks that contain data into a .vhd file stored on the target. Subsequent image backups are simply deltas where only new and changed data is written to the .vhd file, and the old data from the changed blocks are moved out of the VHD and into the shadow copy storage area. I understand that Volume Shadow Copy Service is used to compute the changed data between backups, as well as to handle the process of moving the old data out to the shadow copy area on the target. This makes the backups fast, since only changed blocks are backed up, and efficient, since data is stored in a compact manner.

3. I understand that it has no intelligent drive rotation capabilities to facilitate off-site storage. I could beat the drive rotation problem by setting up a free iSCSI target on a FreeBSD machine to present a block device to Windows 7. This way, I would not be required to rotate the device, and I could achieve my objective of delta backups to the VSS storage area. Network traffic would be so low, even a wireless connection could handle it. For an off-site copy, I could periodically copy off the contents of the iSCSI target to a USB 3.0 or eSATA drive connected to the UNIX host, without tying up the laptop during the copy.

4. I understand the GUI can schedule, as well as wbadmin command line utility that could be scheduled from a batch file.

 

Question:

When using wbadmin, I don't understand the ramifications of vssFull and vssCopy and which to use when. This means that I also don't know how to use them to duplicate the behavior of the GUI to achieve the full backup and subsequent deltas.

 

Thoughts:

What thoughts do you have that might improve upon this plan?

Thanks!

 

Continue reading...