Backing Up My System

[besweeet]

Just installed the full version of Macrium Reflect. My trial is running out, and I don't like the way incremental backups work. They pretty much act as if they were their own independent backup, so you have to restore them one-by-one after restoring your initial backup.

I'll just stick with the free backup, and do a weekly backup of my system.

I'm still not completely sure how restoring the backup will work, though. Since it doesn't restore the boot loader, how would one boot into the restore backup? I guess I could install my copy of Windows first, format it, then restore my backup... I'll probably shoot them an email.

 

[Cato]

If you use the differential backup you only have to have the last scheduled backup plus the original full backup. I've restored twice with it after stupid user errors.

You need to burn a boot disk in order to restore the backup in the event of total failure. It's a good idea to test it by restoring it to another drive, if you have one. If you don't have another drive you can use, boot your computer with the boot disk and go through the motions up until you have to do an actual restore. Be forewarned that when you boot from the CD you will begin to think that it's not going to work. Long time black screen with no evidence that anything is going on, so don't panic. At least that's what happens in my system.

 

[besweeet]

Uninstalled the full trial, installed the free version. Will do a backup tonight.

 

[whs]

Just got thru reading this whole thread. As a real Macrium fan, let me make a few comments:

1. The free version does restore the MBR - your choice
2. I personally do not like differentials at all because if the chain is broken, you got a problem. I do full images every second day, both of my system and my data partitions. I have 3 different target disks and it takes from 12 minutes (SSD to internal HDD) to 20 minutes (SSD to external disk). Those are 20GB images. I use 2 different external disks - one that is connected all the time and one that is only connected for the imaging.
3. Restores (with the Linux disk) work great. i have done that at least 10 times (some for testing, some out of neccessity).
4. If you really want differentials, Paragon is the best choice. That was designed for servers where images are made every few minutes. The differentials are extremely fast.

 

[besweeet]

Just made a full backup using the free version. Took 01:20:50 (hr:min:sec). The used space of the partition I chosen to backup was 160GB. Size of the backup partition was 121GB on medium compression.

 

[whs]

Holy cow, this is a BIG image. The biggest I have ever seen was 60GB on one of my Vista systems which had two vBox virtual partitions. But nowadays I keep my OS partition small and seperate my data to a seperate partition (can be even several partitions). That way the imaging is more expedient and I can schedule the partitions seperately depending on need.
Btw: If you right click on the Xml file in Macrium, you can set the schedule.

 

[besweeet]

I know that this thread hasn't been posted in in nearly a year, but I thought that I should be able to update it without starting a new post.

So, I read that Windows Backup (in Windows 7) supports incremental backups. Great, right? Nope. It doesn't remove previous files, so I quickly ran out of disk space.

I'll be trying EASEUS Todo Backup Home next. I like their software, and most of what they make is completely freeware with no real feature limitations.

If that doesn't work, I'll just manually copy and paste files from my 2 disks (SSD: 1 partition, HDD: 3 partitions) onto my external hard drive once a week overnight.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

As far as I can tell, incremental imaging at the consumer level is an accident waiting to happen. More complexity, more things to go wrong, more opportunity for operator error. Most people seem to just do fulls.

But if you are the type that needs to keep dozens of images, I can see where space might get to be an issue.

 

[besweeet]

Well, in Mac OS X, you have Time Machine, and I'm sure you're familiar with it. It was a perfect way of easily backing up files. In Windows, I've yet to find anything like it.

Oh well. Manual backing it is.