Beginner Backup and Restore Questions

[Norm]

These are pretty basic but....

 

My bottom line question is: what is the "best way" to backup and then restore the main internal drive to original condition in a disaster?

 

Is it better to use Retrospect to Backup the entire drive (and continue to do incremental backups daily), or

 

is it better to Duplicate the Drive to an external partition, say monthly, perform Backups daily on the User folder and then use that duplicate as a base if there is a disaster and update its User folder from the daily backups?

 

Specifically:

 

I have 3 external FW drives with one always offsite.

I backup the User folder daily to a backup partition on each of the two connected drives.

Monthly, I swap one drive to offsite first making a Duplicate of my internal hard drive to a partition and then a new duplicate to a partition of the hard drive I'm connecting.

 

Now if I were to have a major crash.... :-(

 

I was going to get back in operation by either:

 

Using the most recent Duplicate on one of the external hard drive partitions. I'd run a Restore (Replace Corresponding Files) from the most recent Backup to that external partition to bring the User folder up to date but the balance of that Duplicate could be a month old,

 

or if the internal hard drive is OK

 

I was going to run a duplicate to the internal hard drive of that most recent duplicate on the external. And then the same approach, run a Restore (Replace Corresponding Files) from the most recent backup to my internal hard drive bringing the User folder up to date.

 

Is that the way to go or is there a "better" approach.

 

Thank you.

[Lennart_T]

>Is it better to use Retrospect to Backup the entire drive (and continue to do incremental backups daily)

 

That's what I would do. What if something happens outside the Users folder between the Monthly full backup and the crash?

 

Regards

Lennart