How To Back Up?

Macrium reflect. I have done hundreds of restores with no issue and it is easy to use.

Geneo said:

Macrium reflect. I have done hundreds of restores with no issue and it is easy to use.

While Macrium Reflect Free is certainly infinitely more flexible and reliable than anything built into Windows 10, you will notice the OP stated:

NiceAndShy said:

I know there are many 3rd party apps that will backup, but I just want to use something that's in-built into Windows 10 Pro.

Thank you for any help!

So, while Macrium Reflect Free is a much better choice due to it's flexibility above and beyond what Windows backup and restore will do, and is much more reliable, based upon the numerous posts regarding the failures of built-in Windows backup and restore - the OP really wants to stick with the applications that MS supplies even though there is a much greater chance that doing so will leave him up the proverbial creek without a proverbial paddle to restore his computer with should something catastrophic happen.

Bree said:

Or use 'copy-and-paste' then, when it shows the list of duplicates for you, check the contents manually to decide if you need to tick the box to keep one, the other or both.

Thanks! I'll need to think about what to do.

NavyLCDR said:

While Macrium Reflect Free is certainly infinitely more flexible and reliable than anything built into Windows 10, you will notice the OP stated:

NavyLCDR said:

So, while Macrium Reflect Free is a much better choice due to it's flexibility above and beyond what Windows backup and restore will do, and is much more reliable, based upon the numerous posts regarding the failures of built-in Windows backup and restore - the OP really wants to stick with the applications that MS supplies even though there is a much greater chance that doing so will leave him up the proverbial creek without a proverbial paddle to restore his computer with should something catastrophic happen.

You make some good points, but it just seems like I'd be giving a 3rd party app soooo much access to my personal information since the 3rd party will have access to all of my files...

Thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people are using Macrium Reflect for backup imaging and restoring.

But how does that make it any more safer? I feel much safer knowing that only Microsoft has access to my files than an app company.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

NavyLCDR said:

While Macrium Reflect Free is certainly infinitely more flexible and reliable than anything built into Windows 10, you will notice the OP stated:



So, while Macrium Reflect Free is a much better choice due to it's flexibility above and beyond what Windows backup and restore will do, and is much more reliable, based upon the numerous posts regarding the failures of built-in Windows backup and restore - the OP really wants to stick with the applications that MS supplies even though there is a much greater chance that doing so will leave him up the proverbial creek without a proverbial paddle to restore his computer with should something catastrophic happen.

I don't need you to censure my post, the OP can think for himself. Windows backup is just plain the wrong choice. And, why would you comment on my post then promote macrium in a post right afterwards. Bizarre.

NiceAndShy said:

But how does that make it any more safer? I feel much safer knowing that only Microsoft has access to my files than an app company.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

macrium doesn't have access to your files. They just supply a program to you that backs your data up to your local disk. None of it is accessible to macrium the company. In fact you can choose to encrypt your backups with macrium.

Geneo said:

macrium doesn't have access to your files. They just supply a program to you that backs your data up to your local disk. None of it is accessible to macrium the company. In fact you can choose to encrypt your backups with macrium.

Thanks, but I still feel less safe knowing that a 3rd party app is able to view all of my files.

Is the backup system in Windows 10 Pro really much worse than Macrium or other 3rd party backup apps???

NiceAndShy said:

Is the backup system in Windows 10 Pro really much worse than Macrium or other 3rd party backup apps???

Backup and Restore's 'make a System Image' is very basic. Like all free MS apps supplied with a Windows install (think Wordpad, Paint) it does a no-frills job, but other apps offer far more features (think MS Word, PhotoShop).

Windows own System Image backup has very few user options, for instance it does use a compression algorithm but it is not user-selectable - it compresses if saving an image to DVD, doesn't if to an HDD. There are no options to resize a system image on restore to fit a different partition size. The only boot media it can create is on an optical drive (CD or DVD), not a lot of use on recent systems with no DVD drive and only USB ports. When a system image is created on external media (HDD or DVD) it may not be recognised and offered as a valid image to be restored - it seems critically important to boot from a CD made by the same revision of software that made the system image.

Having said all that, I have used it regularly and successfully since Windows 7. Only once did I have a problem - and that was resolved by trying each of my (extensive collection of) boot CDs in turn until I found the one that could see the image to restore.

Macrium Reflect (by all accounts on these boards and elswhere) is reliable and feature-rich (think LibreOffice Write vs, Wordpad). I haven't (yet) needed to try it, but it would seem the obvious first choice if I did.

Thanks, but you're referring to the "System Image" backup option in Windows 10 Pro, but what about the other option called "File History"?

What's your opinion of "File History"?