Thanks for all answers; it's becomes a bit weirder on this front. I have a 500 GB external HD which for some reason, when I bought a new PC -- wonderfully faster -- about a year ago, the external unit didn't seem to be backing-up. Something about the software not being "found" in my system. ????? I never followed it through to success. Today I got a popup which indicated that, "Memeo is running in another"(something); "Sign in and" (do such and such). My pea-brain did (such and such) and suddenly the Western Digital external is cranking -- "383 GB FREE"- and in the right lower corner of my monitor is an indicator: [file name].[whatever extension] "sent to Jerry_Backup", almost faster than I can read the changing file names.
I guess I'll just have to wait-out the online backup which is now up to 92.4 GB with 150 GB Pending. Oh, the joys of living on a road-approachable, coastal island where cable service isn't available. Word is that ISP companies won't put in cable service unless 1000 customers are to be registered.
Georgetown? See photo from a parade float on 07-04-2007. Clarification: mostly a fishing community which is also a retirement community where the population increases hugely in the summer when families arrive at homes which have served generations of said families. But still, no cable!
HR
If you ever had to recover everything from the online backup, it wouldn't take as long as the upload, for several reasons.
Firstly, you almost certainly have aDSL, which means your upload speed is slower than your download speed. (The "a" stands for "asymmetric.") The difference between the two varies by providers and plans, but usually your download speed will be three to four times your upload speed.
Secondly, most online backup clients prioritize uploads and downloads differently. The uploads have a lower priority because they try not to slow your other Internet use to a crawl, but the restores usually have a higher priority because they figure you'd like to get your stuff back some time this decade.
Thirdly, you could always take a trip to the home of a friend who has cable or fiber, and download the stuff there, perhaps in exchange for a pizza and a case of decent beer.
Again, my mantra is that you can never have too many backups. Don't think "either-or."
As an aside, you may want to check out a program called
Casper. It's one of the better cloning tools I've come across, not the least reason being that it can do automated differential clones. The clone it creates is bootable, so you can swap it into the computer and boot up.
I never considered Casper a backup solution, per se. I considered it part of a comprehensive backup plan, in which Casper's primary role was to reduce downtime in the case of a hard drive failure. It's saved many a hindquarters in my experience, including my own a couple of times.
The advantage of cloning over imaging is, again, that the clone is bootable, whereas an image needs to be extracted onto the system drive. You just swap the clone in and hit the power button, and the machine starts up in the state it was in when the clone was last refreshed. This saves quite a bit of downtime with a large drive.
The disadvantages are that a clone is more susceptible to malware infection than an archive image is as long as the drive is online; and that with a clone, there's no incrementality, and therefore no way to step backwards once the clone is made. So if there's a problem on the system drive (malware, etc.) when it's cloned, the clone will also have the same problem.
-Rich
