Thanks for the ideas Sandeep and Bert, very helpful. Sandeep I did get a nice PDF from AC Support with basically your instructions for migrating AC itself, that went smoothly.
The first thing I would suggest is two hard drives. You can use two partitions, but if you lose the drive you are completely dependent on the backups. You also didn't mention anything about RAID.
The new machine is RAID 1, two drives. I didn't think to mention that because I was listing all the backup approaches on the old machine, thinking which I should carry over. Also the line is "RAID is not backup" which I guess I can see why.
Another drive in the machine to backup to might have been nice. Of course I can always add it.
I used to use SyncToy a lot, but I don't think it is robust enough to depend on. I remember you could use quite a few options such as copy, sync, left to right, etc. I always worry about syncing if something gets set up right to left rather than left to right and data is deleted from the backup and then overwrites the real data.
I think I use "echo" but yeah I guess if you get it backwards your are hosed. Incidentally NOT for practice stuff I tried Google Drive with about 200GB of data at home, and was absolutely terrified I would end up deleting the real files, so I quit using it and stuck with Carbonite for backups there. There's a difference between backup and N-way syncing.
It's interesting, because Acronis used to be my favorite software, especially when it was Acronis True Image. It was easy and bulletproof. Then, they started making it more and more difficult with vaults and stuff, I couldn't figure it out.
I've always hated Acronis. I tried adding on their cloud backup and it never worked. I just find it overly complicated. I tried Win7 backup at home and didn't immediately like it, wasn't sure what was actually getting backup up. I will trial Backup Assist, see how it is.
What do you mean by "opaque archive?"
Just that with synctoy you end up with the actual files exactly as they are on your machine. With Acronis and others I'm sure you end up with like a .TIB or .BAK file which is proprietary, it contains all your files and their utilities can extract it, but somehow having the exact real files is comforting. I've been using both approachs (synctoy and acronis). I haven't decided going forward what to use exactly, I will try backup assist. Is there something like synctoy which does copies raw files, doesn't stuff them in an archive?
Of course the advantage of the archive approaches is they can usually go back N days. Whereas a single synctoy mirror is only a single day, so if you have a corrupt file BAM your backup becomes corrupt that night. Which is why I did 7 rolling days of synctoy mirrors, but that was a pain to setup.
You mention verifying backups I did that early on but then mostly let it coast. One thing I did setup is an email to me every day (since I don't go into the office normally) with the most recent files on the USB and NAS drives, so I can see the backups actually happened.
The only problem I ended up detecting with that email is when the NAS drive shuts down. Periodically it will just shut down, due to heat maybe but it's never that hot in the office. I had an older dlink NAS drive that had the problem, so recently I upgraded to a new Synology drive, figuring new hardware would fix it, but it still happens.
Thanks for the other ideas and pointers too.
