Good method to back up Win 10 system?

I use AOMEI Backupper. It's free, fast, and does a great job.

badrobot said:

That's okay if you only made a simple mess. If you made your OS unbootable you would want to have a backup outside the OS and restore it back like nothing happened. I can make a complete system image backup with Macrium in less than 3 minutes.

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How big is your system . I am trying reflect now and its pretty good in my opinion. Almost certain I will pay for it after my 30 trial.
just did another test this morning But My system (190gb) took 40mins to back up and 30 mins to restore .
I was reasonably pleased with that too.

Mike

mpooley said:

How big is your system . I am trying reflect now and its pretty good in my opinion. Almost certain I will pay for it after my 30 trial.
just did another test this morning But My system (190gb) took 40mins to back up and 30 mins to restore .
I was reasonably pleased with that too.

Mike

Was that with the standard (Recommended) compression? You might also try file caching, you select it in Advanced Settings, the target drive should allow write caching as well. It should speed up the back-up process.

I don't think you can go wrong with Macrium, I have used the paid version for a couple of years.

There is nothing wrong with the Windows back up image it does what it says on the tin and I've tried it and my image restored as expected, however it comes up as a windows 7 image from a windows 10 CD rescue disk.
Regards

If you want a totally flawless backup, you could use my method.

Advantages:
-Absolute perfect byte-for-byte backup.
-Can be restored to an exact point
(for example if you backed up, upgraded operating system and found it did not work, you can go back to the exact point you were at when you backed up)
-Compressed with very fast decompression or very good compression ratio
-Completely free

Disadvantages:
-Cannot be backup up while using Windows
-Is not a differencing backup
-Generally must have an equal or larger sized storage disk to contain the backup
-You must be more technically literate, as there is no GUI. (though you can use one if you want)


This works particularly well if Windows is installed on an SSD, and you have a large HDD for data.

Download a Linux distribution. I use ArchLinux.

Boot the operating system in Live mode.

Locate your system partition with

Code:

fdisk -l

or

Code:

blkid

Mount the location where you wanna save the backup.

Code:

mount /dev/sdXn /mnt

Then using the Unix command

Code:

dd if=/dev/sdXn bs=10M | lz4 -v > /mnt/path/to/backup.img.lz4

The backup begins, and will be a perfect image compressed with a fast modern compression algorithm.


To restore the image you use

Code:

lz4 -d /mnt/path/to/backup.img.lz4 | dd of=/dev/sdXn bs=10M

When finished, unmounts your backup store location, and/or simply reboot.




Online backups (online meaning when using the operating system to be backed up, not meaning the internet) are great and all but all of the Windows tools I've seen are limited in that they don't back up 100% of everything, and cannot help you much when your filesystem gets corrupted. You still gotta reinstall and set everything back up.

Other software that makes full image backups always seems to have some lame catch (proprietary image format, must buy pro version to restore more than 10GB, cannot backup X because of Y limitation). Perfect image backup with 'dd' is the most thorough backup you can get. And you can even mount the backed up image from within windows using ImDisk.

With ImDisk you can actually get a lot of the same results, but that's out of the scope of this post.

owensdj said:

Using Macrium Reflect and saving the images onto an external hard drive is the way I do it.

Everyone I've talked to lately has suggested this, I'll have to look it up - Thanks for reminding me!

lvgandhi said:

I also use Macrium reflect free.

How does that run, does it do what you need?

I found a limitation on Macrium reflect that I am not keen about. You can't schedule multiple backups per day.
I know it can be done via scripting but I can't see why they haven't made this easier.

I am trying Ameoi Professional at the moment as well as Macrium. It DOES do multiple backups per day and seems just a reliable at restoring too.
As its less money than macrium and for that you get two licences and it's free upgrades forever I think I will buy that instead!

I will keep doing backups and restoring them for a week or two but if I don't get any problems I'll buy it.

Mike

However you back up, don't leave your backup drive attached or mapped when you are not using it. Ransomware like Cryptolocker will encrypt any drive that it finds so you'll still be SOL if your backups get encrypted too.