What's the best way to image W10 partitions for backup?

Hi -- I am looking for a good imaging program that will back up individual partitions in W10 -- including the boot partition. Preferably it's free but doesn't have to be.

I had previously tried Aomei Backupper with W8.1 but just had a lot of problems restoring from image backups. Essentially, using the Aomei image backups destroyed my ability to boot up and I wasted nearly two days looking for solutions on the web without success. It appears these current UEFI boot partitions are trickier to back up and restore than the older boot partitions in Windows. I have been using backup image programs for Windows for over 10 years, starting with True Image products and this is the first time I have had my system/bootup files messed up like this.

Perhaps there are some settings in Aomei I missed, but if so, then they are not very apparent.

I am upgrading to W10 on this same computer today and would like to take an early snapshot of the OS and some basic programs I install to make it easier in the future to recover.

Any suggestions?

TIA!

Chris2000 said:

Hi -- I am looking for a good imaging program that will back up individual partitions in W10 -- including the boot partition. Preferably it's free but doesn't have to be.
I am upgrading to W10 on this same computer today and would like to take an early snapshot of the OS and some basic programs I install to make it easier in the future to recover.

Any suggestions?

TIA!

Hi... I know I'm way too late to help you but someone else may have the same question so here goes.

I use Macrium Reflect free version, image the whole drive periodically with incremental backups and it's just saved me after my hdd died without warning. (Totalled, even gone in Diskpart.) To make it worse my bios had no legacy boot option so I couldn't even boot from my USB drive with my collection of tools.

The only thing that would boot was the Macrium Rescue usb. Tested the hdd on another PC and it was truly toast.

Actually just got back with new hdd and it literally took only 10 minutes to unscrew the hdd panel, plug in the new hdd, boot to Macrium USB and start the full image restore from the portable hdd. It's still chugging along at 80% of the 800 gb backup, and smooth sailing. This is 3rd time I've used it without a single hiccup.

BTW I have no affiliation with the company; it's just a great product, with the free version actually being good. After this last rescue I just might buy it.

Hope this is helpful to someone.

Calli

Definitely Macrium Reflect