Backing up and IQ

[480sparky38 37]

I got thinking about this the other day, and I can't seem to find a straight answer on-line.

If you use a back-up program for your hard drive, does it cause any image degradation when it saves all your programs, files, images, etc. into one humongous file on an external drive? Can you restore/extract the image without any loss of quality?

Or would one be better off just copying image files from the hard drive to a back-up like an external drive? I realize this would take longer and require more memory, but my computer has nothing else to do every night.

 

[ann]

No there isn't any degradation. I do both, auto backup of the whole system, and copying to 4 other drives folder by folder. Not my favorite thing to do, but necessary. Had a hard drive problem last week and ended up with wiping the drive then have to re-load, etc. All that being bored pays off.

 

[Garbz]

Actually you will find that there is very little space difference between a single file that has been backed up by a backup program and one that has been copied. The reason being is that images are by their chaotic nature very hard to compress without loss.

All backup programs use some form of lossless compression. When backing up documents, text, or files with repetition or patterns they compress rather well and appear much smaller than the original, but if you backup a folder of images, the backup will be about the same size as a straight copy.

My backup process is just that, a straight copy using a sync program to determine if a file has changed and needs backing up or not.