BleepingComputer.com: Any good recommendations on backup software?

Surprised to see how no one recommended Dropbox.
Get Dropbox, I will say and recommend it. Its really nice and gives you 2GB worth of free space on the cloud(online backup).

And if you follow this link to get dropbox(which is a referral of me) you will get 250MB more(in total you would get 2.25GB) and you will give me the same amount of space more too(250MB). BONUS for both of us.
Follow this link if you wish to get dropbox and wish to get 250MB more free space -
https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTUwMDk5NTA5

Hope it works for you, just like it does for me.

Well, one thing that is very important to know in your situation, arc14716, is that there is a big difference in data backup and image backup/disk clone software. Most of the recommendations you've gotten so far have been for image backups. Those are great if you already have the program installed and have made backups before you have problems like an infection--then they will just reinstall your whole system, programs and all to like it was before the problem. But if you install an image backup program now when Windows is broken beyond repair, then you reformat and then use your image backup program to reinstall the entire system, you are going to reinstall the problem you wanted to get rid of by reformatting in the first place.

In your situation you need to reinstall Windows and then reinstall your programs--this way your operating system and main programs are more likely to work "new out of the box". What a malware removal helper means by "back up your data" has nothing to do with saving the programs you have on your computer, but documents and other personal items like Favorites/bookmarks that are personal to you and your use of the computer that are mostly non executable files. Programs are executable files and those are what you want to get rid of with the reformat as that is what is broken or infected. About the only executable files you might want to make backups of are setups files that aren't easily redownloaded.

So at this point you don't even have to have a program to backup your data. You just need to move your data off the hard drive that's about to be reformatted, to CD/DVD, another hard drive (external or internal), a USB Flash drive, online "in the cloud" service", etc. If you have limited space, use a compression tool like 7Zip or Bitser that was mentioned, but it is basically a matter of moving files and folders. When the reformat is done you just move the files and folders back to your hard drive as you want them.

The "data" that most people back up are things like documents (anything you might save in Word/Office or similar or Excel/spreadsheets), email that you want to save to your harddrive, photos, videos, music files, bookmark favorites, license keys to software you've purchased--any data that you have typed in to any program that allows that or anything that you have saved to a folder on your hard drive. For example, organizer/ToDo list programs will have database files stored somewhere--usually in your My Documents folder or in Application Data (check the program's documentation to find out where). These need to be backed up also. Most important among these database type programs (that I almost forgot) would be a password manager, if you have one of those installed. But data is basically information--you need to think hard about what information you have on your hard drive that you want to keep. Unfortunately, just about everyone forgets something and so some data gets lost in situations like yours.

From what you posted, it sounds as if you may not use your computer for storing personal data--if most of your files are on CD/DVD already then you don't really have any data to back up and are not going to be badly impacted by potential data loss.

So the recommended backup strategy is to reformat, reinstall Windows, update Windows so it is fully patched, tweak your Windows settings such as desktop appearance, install all your programs that you use the most, and when you get it set up as you like it, then run an image or clone backup program like Acronis, Macrium, Paragon, etc. If the program allows it, make a Disaster Recovery CD. This way, the next time your hard drive crashes or you get badly infected, you can recover your entire system, programs and all, quickly.

If you schedule your image backup program to make new or incremental images every few days, you may be able to use it as a data backup program as well. Because some programs allow you to mount the image so that you can pull files off of it.

I use data entry programs nearly every day, so I use both an image backup (Acronis True Image) and a data backup program. The latter because I have an old computer, and since the image backups are too resource intensive for me to make them every day, and because you can't have too many backups. Sometimes a database file I'm using will get corrupted or accidentally deleted, so it's easier to use a data backup program to replace the one file rather than restore your entire hard drive, or even to mount the image, altho Acronis makes the latter pretty easy.

Currently I'm using GFI Backup, but I plan on switching back to Cobian as GFI is somewhat buggy and not well supported by GFI in my opinion. It was known as Titan Backup before GFI bought it. One thing I really hate to give up is that it has a folder sync function that Cobian doesn't. But Cobian is the only freeware data backup program that I recommend along with Microsoft Backup Utility. I've heard good things about Handy backup that has also been mentioned here, but it isn't freeware.

Hello,

New here but thought i should put some of my own opinions...

I started using Oops!Backup by Altaro For now it seems pretty good. I mean i tried a few other softwares around (mostly free ones and trials) but this was the best one for me. It has the back in time function like Time Machine of Mac and works silently in the background. Not expensive (that's why i decided to buy it). Hope this helped. x

Hey folks,
Not sure how many blind users are on this board, but since I'm a blind user, I figured that I'd put this out. Neither Achronis nor Paragon have very good reputations with the blind and their screen reading software such as JAWS 11, System Access (both of them I use), Window-Eyes, or NVDA. I'd recommend Image for Windows by terrabyte Unlimited. Not free, but I've heard from another member of the blind community that it works very well with screen readers. And another program that allows for the mounting of images to virtual drives is UltraIso (which I also use). And I haven't backed up lots of data incrimentally in a long time since my horrible school incident. I moved one particular file from one partition to the other (N:\ to C:\), and ever since then, there was continual data loss on that file only. No others were effected though. How strange. Just watch out for that.

Regards,
Chromebuster