New year has started with a lot of interesting products to come out. Windows Server 2008 has been scheduled to be released at 28th of February 2008 and the VMWare ESX 3.5 just come out before Christmas last year. Before starting to evaluate and play around with the new products it’s good think back what you did last year. For me new year always starts with having a backup of my  important personal files and store them on DVD’s and other media.

At work I backup my PST files each month manually and than I zip them to save free space on my USB disk; for my private data I did this last year january.

Lately I am evaluating Acronis True Image products and starting this new year I will work with a full-backup and differential-backup concept. I already created 18GB high-compressed and encrypted (AES 256bit) full backup archive of my personal files at home.

I verified the archive couple minutes and I am ready to go to store the huge tib file on my secondsata- and usb disk. From now I will schedule a task to update the archive with changed files each month using a differential method based on the full backup archive.

The Acronis tool is using different method than NTBackup for example when creating full and differential backups. The builtin Windows ntbackup.exe tool will include complete changed files from the initial full backup, but the Acronis tool will only backup the deltas (bits changed) on a file. Using this method the sequential backup size of my monthly backups will be minimal.

For more information on Acronis True Image please visit their website.