Automatic Backup, no space for it, should I care?

[flamenco]

Hi All,
I wanted to get your opinions on something. How important are those automatic Rescue and Recovery backups? Do you always do them? Skip them?

Background: Once a week or so, I get a pop-up message saying that I don't have enough space for a backup. I didn't set this up myself, so I think it must be a part of Rescue and Recovery that came with the unit. Sometimes I'll respond by deleting a bunch of stuff, but then I get the same message the next week.

I do make backups very regularly, but only of important data files and things that would be a huge pain to lose, not the whole drive. When looking at My Computer, on my 60G drive I have about 10G free. I have a fair amount of data, but it's surprising to me that I would be taking up so much space. After poking around a bit, it seems that much of this space is actually backed up data (?).

Part of me thinks, just ditch the huge backup and get more space on the drive. Yet, then I'll think that having a full backup may be my only chance to restore the operating system if things go to hell. Or maybe it would help to know how much free space I need for backups. Maybe the backup just replaces the old one and I don't have enough temp space for the backup?

Your thoughts?
Thanks!!! Dave

[jdhurst]

I do not use these on-board backups. Unless you back up to a DVD, the backup is useless if the hard drive crashes.

I use SyncBack Pro to replicate about 10Gb or so of data between my Vista work machine and my home XP Desktop. I keep email on both computers and occassionally copy my Vista .PST file to my Desktop. I further keep my huge File Store (programs) on my Desktop F: drive (3 copies in total).

Should a hard drive crash, I can rebuild very easily. ... JDH

[ZaZ]

I do a clean install and use True Image to make a backup, which can be put back at any time. I keep my data on separate partition so I don't have to mess with it if I need to re-install. I also have several backups of that data.