Hello Lourens, and welcome to Seven Forums.
Yes, you will not lose any files that are already on the ext HDD. The system image backup will just be saved in a folder (see note at top of tutorial) on the ext HDD, so nothing will be affected by it.
The image backup of the selected drives will include everything at the time it was created, so yes those will be included in it as well. :)
Hope this helps,
Shawn
Wow, this is just too easy. I am finished already! Thanks for your superfast reply and I will see you around on the forum!
Shawn, a couple (some probably stupid) questions (I have not used the tool yet)
1- The incremental part: is it true incremental, meaning that if I clean up files, they would show up again in case I do a recovery using the last date?
2- By being incremental, is it safe to assume that unless I added a lot of stuff, regular backups will not be incredibly long (talking about a couple hundred gigs total size)
3- I have my user files in a different partition. If I recover from an image, will it create the partitions or do I have to do it manually?
I am also in doubt which strategy I should use for backup: I have 2 500G drives, the "active" one partitioned as mentioned above. Let's call Part1 the system partition and Part2 the user file partition
What would be better:
A- Image Part1 to a partition in the backup drive, and only touch it in case I add programs; perform a User and System file backup of Part2 regularly to a second partition on the backup drive
B- Just image the whole thing to the backup drive and update it regularly
I am wondering if it will work and if I would have any advantage with option A
Hello Walter,
Q1) Deleting any part of the incremental backup will render the backup useless. It needs all of the previous incremental backups to be able to restore the backup.
Q2) Correct, the first one will be large, then the rest will only include what was changed. This is the main reason why in Q1 that you cannot delete any parts of the backup.
Q3) If you also select the partition that the user files are on when you create the system image backup, then it will also include them in the backup as well. It will also restore the partitions as they were when the backup was created.
Personally, I like having a image of a clean install with all of my drivers and programs installed as one image, then keep a separate updated image of the current install. It just depends on what would work best for you though.
Hope this helps,
Shawn
Tks a bunch Shawn. I think your suggestion would work the best, it is more or less what I thought, but I didn't think of having two images. How would you do that, just select different destinations? I don't think you can pick a name for the image, right?
Also, in Q1 I meant when you delete from the source data, not from the image. Suppose I delete 100M worth of files today, re-image, then restore. Will this last image contain the 100M (since they were on the previous increment) or not?
Tks again
You're welcome Walter,
Yeah, you would select different locations for each system image backup to be saved to. I just created a second partition on the second hard drive, and have one on each.
Q1) Oh. Yep, if you delete 100MB of files, the new incremental backups will not include it of course, but the previous incremental backups would still have it.
Tks again.
Uhn, the image might get very big in time, I think one has to consider from time to time to erase the existing one and just create a new one, to get rid of the old stuff.
This weekend will be Transfer and Image weekend! Finished my build, now I need to transfer everything from the old machine and create the images.
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