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What is the benefit of Backup software backing up to a single file?


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What is the benefit of backup software backing your files and folders into a nonstandard file, instead of an exact file / folder structured list? I can see if the backup program is encrypting your backup, then yes an encrypted file would be done. But if you aren't encrypting your data why the file? I don't want a gob, I just want to open my backup drive and the backup folder and see a list of the files and folders it backed up. If I wanted to encrypt I would just do whole drive encrypting on the backup drive.

Also, when you backup to the file, don't you then have to use that same software to get the data back off the drive? In the case of a failure you couldn't juar can't plug the backup drive into the computer and browse the file / folder structure. Programs that backup to a single file frighten me. I feel much more comfortable with the other method of doing things.

So how do you guys do backups, do you backup to a single file containing all your backed up files or do you backup to a standard file / folder structure?

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the single file approach could also enable compression.

although copying a single file is much speedier than copying lots too for backing up the backup etc.

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I use DriveImage XML

Yes, but that is imaging the drive, that has to be a file. I'm talking about file backups.

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There's not much you can do with an image file that you couldn't do with individual files. Some programs store files in ZIP archives, which can be compressed and encrypted. I used to use a program which kept multiple versions by storing older versions in separate folders.

I do prefer single file backups for one reason though: They're just so much faster. Archiving thousands of small files to a single file is much faster than storing those files individually.

The program I use is portable, so I can run it in a WinPE environment.

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this has been standard since I have been involved with computers and backups. Compression is the main reason. Backup Exec use to use the same file format as windows backup not sure if that is the same or not now. Everything, including imaging, includes compression. You can do vss and any standard backup to be able to recover faster and in a way that you would like, by browsing the history and copying and pasting back.

But as I said, it comes down to compression, possibly encrypting, and even more by deduplication.

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