Best windows back up program

I personally advise against both incremental and differential imaging since it is possible to lose one of the image parts. If the only thing being imaged are your OS and programs, images don't eat up that much room, allowing one to keep several images on hand.

I make one off system images and store a number on more than one external drive. I keep my OS partition with installed programs to a manageable size (< 60 GB) requiring imaging and restoration time < 10 minutes.
I have a number of portable programs store on drives other than the OS drive. These require less frequent backing up.

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AOMEI Backupper Professional Giveaway

deepintheforest said:

Lady Fitzgerald said:

I use the paid version of Macrium Reflect but the free version is plenty for most people. I only use it to image my boot drive which only has my OS and programs on it. I have it set to automatically verify an image as soon as it finishes making it. I rarely have an image fail to verify but the few times that happened, I just ran Reflect again and the image would verify afterwards. I've never had a verified image fail to restore and I have restored images many times.

While imaging is the best way to verify system files (OS and programs), imaging is too time consuming and requires to much space to efficiently backup data. To backup my data drives, I use a folder/file syncing programFreeFileSync set to Mirror. It compares a source drive or folder to the destination drive (i.e. backup drive) or folder and copies files from the source drive to the destination drive or folder and/or deletes files on the destination drive or folder as needed to update the destination drive or folder to be essentially a clone of the source. Since only files that have been added, changed, or deleted since the previous update are affected, the update is much faster than an image which involves all the files on the source drive. FreeFileSync also has a feature that allows it to send files being deleted to a Versioning drive or folder. That protects you from accidental deletions and also allows you to recover earlier versions of a file.

I am following Lady Fitzgerald's excellent advice.
I am using Macrium to create images of 'C' drive.
I have Operating System and programmes plus some data on 'C' and two data drives 'D' and 'E'. Is there a way to get Free File Sync to run a batch file that will mirror all three drives in sequence and then turn off?

I really don't know. You might try asking on the FreeFileSync Forums.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend automatically syncing three drives sequentially unless you are backing up to a backup drive that is large enough to hold the data from all three drives. That would require the all three backup drives to be connected to the computer at the same time and they would remain connected until you later disconnected them. It would be safer to just run one backup at a time. Since FreeFileSync is pretty much a start it and leave it alone kind of program, I strongly suggest just starting hooking up the first backp drive, starting FFS, then walk away until it is done (that's what I do). If it is too inconvenient to do all three in the same, say, evening, just do C: one day, D: the next day, and E: the third day.

Of course, if you have more than one dock or external backup drive and your computer is powerful enough, you may be able to run all three simultaneously. I have found you can have more than one instance of FFS running at the same time but I haven't actually tried doing three backups simultaneously since I have only one built-in dock in my current machine. If you do try it, I would love to hear about the results since I'm going to have three built-in docks in the next machine.

If you do not have very much data on the C: drive, you might find it easier to set up an FFS batch file to automatically back up that data to one of your data drives (I do that with my Favorites folder). That will get backed up when you back up the data drive (I do the same thing with my images).