Windows 10: In search of free backup software

jayv2251 said:

What are my alternatives, until I can either build or buy a nas that I can attach to my router?

USB external hard drive:
300GB - 500GB, Desktop External Hard Drives, Hard Drives, Components - Newegg.com

$70 or so for 500GB. Or if you have an available internal SATA port and mounting point for a second hard drive, you can just install a permanent internal hard drive for backup storage.

The problem with internet cloud storage is two-fold. The first problem is connection speed. How long is it going to take you to upload and then download a multi-GB image? The second concern is restoring in the event of a total system storage (hard drive) failure. What are you going to use to connect to the internet and the cloud storage location to retrieve the backup from and then install it on the computer?

Well, here is another option and it doesn't cost anything. Start IE and make sure all your favorites are up to date and working the way you want them too. Then copy those favorites to a USB stick or a temp folder for safekeeping. Then when Edge loses your favorites, copy your backup back to the favorites folder for IE, and then Start Edge and then do an import of IE favorites from Edge. Works like a charm...not only that, if Edge won't load a page, fire up IE and try it from there.

NavyLCDR...... Assuming the worst has happened, and my drive is totally dead. I would then buy new drive, before using the Windows 10 ISO to reinstall the OS. After doing that, I'd probably have a huge batch of patches to install-reboot-install-repeat for Windows. Would I not be able to then restore my backed up personal files? Other wise it doesn't makes sense to do full backups, just your personal files. Then I got to thinking.... I thought I had seen somewhere that I didn't need the iso. So I did a quick search and came up with this....

How to do Windows 10 Full Backup and Restore? - Technig

The only thing the article didn't mention was, what if you've upgraded drives? Say my current 500G dies, and I do some savvy shopping and find a 1 or 2T drive on sale or heck even an SSD. How does restore handle the drive size or manufacture differences?

Play2mefish.... I can't use IE. When I first upgraded Windows 8.1 to 10, I did use IE as I was unfamiliar with Edge. But I had several critical crashes doing so. That's actually why I became a member of this forum. After ruling everything else out, it was determined IE and Windows 10 on my system just didn't want to work and play well together. Ever since then (a year now)I haven't crashed once. Although I had a hiccup of sorts that caused me to loose all my favorites, that's the only thing that I lost, but that was due to a virus issue.

I did hear that either Chrome or Firefox does a backup of your favorites automatically. I need to look into that, then I can do something like you suggested by importing files back and forth.

@jayv2251,
From the link you posted, " It’s recommended to use Windows built-in backup options*to make a Window 10 full backup."

Most of the long term members here will disagree with that statement. Windows built-in backup options have proven to be very unreliable and very finicky. A third party backup and restore solution such as Macrium Reflect Free has proven to be much more reliable and flexible. Macrium Reflect offers you the ability to create a recovery USB flash drive or DVD. Assuming you make the recovery USB flash drive or DVD.....

1. You create a full image backup of your hard drive onto an external hard drive. Macrium only saves the used space of your drive, so if you have 200GB of space actually used on your hard drive it will create 1 image file about 180 GB in size (allowing for compression) saved onto the external hard drive.

2. Your 500 GB hard drive fails and you replace it with a 1 TB hard drive.

3. You boot the computer from the Macruim Reflect recovery USB flash drive or DVD and connect the external hard drive containing your backup image.

4. You restore the image to the new hard drive. You have two choices. You can leave everything sized the way it was and after recovery you can create a new partition in the remaining space to store data on - you end up with a new drive letter such as E:\ that is empty but fills the rest of the hard drive

OR

5. You can restore the image to the new hard drive and tell Macrium to increase the size of the OS partition to fill the new hard drive entirely. C: drive increases to fill the entire drive.

The restored image will operate exactly the way it did the moment that it was created. All your data files will be there, all your settings will be there, all your user accounts will be there, etc. The only thing that you will lose is whatever you did between the time you created the backup image and when the old hard drive failed. You can periodically update the backup image saved on the external hard drive to minimize the amount of data you lose when you have to recover it.

Another recovery option with Macrium would be to clean install Windows 10 from a Windows 10 installation USB flash drive or DVD. Then you would re-install Macrium Reflect Free in the new Windows. You then mount the image file saved on the external hard drive and you can retrieve individual files from it like your documents, photos, music, etc. You could also re-install missing device drivers from it. What you would not be able to do is retrieve your installed programs from it - you would have to re-install those from their own installation setup files..

I'm starting to get a clearer picture of what I think I might want to do. I just don't have the expertise to know if what I'm thinking is a pipe dream or not. As I mentioned earlier, I just started working from home. While things are tight and such, I have to lay the proper ground work now for future use. I'm currently using my laptop for my 1099 contract jobs. I do see the need in the future to replace this with a desktop, while keeping my laptop in reserve if I'm working more then one contract at a time or an equipment back up should the desktop fail. Outside this, since I need to use the work computers solely for work, I would like to also build a media tower for pc games and running Kodi or Plex media servers. Meanwhile both my wife and daughter would like their own laptops, not to mention once I really get going with my work, I'll be replacing our government phone with smart phones. And I want ALL of these devices backed up regularly.

You commented one issue with using cloud storage for backups was speed. What about drives connected to my router? My current router offers 2 usb slots, and if I'm not mistaken some NAS boxes also connect via Ethernet. Wouldn't this be fast...as well as a bit more secure?

I'm still a bit confused on how I should go about all this. I will of course install the free version of Macrium Reflect, so as to CYA my system. The questions is....as budget permits I need to have a plan on how to protect my system, including both business and personal devices. While I do trust the great folks on here and appreciate the advice given, as many of you have really helped me out in some dire situations. I can't thank you all enough for this.

Having said that, what is a really good source to read on the best way to go about all this. Since I'm running a business, having redundant reliable backups is a must. My family's personal stuff might be even more difficult to deal with. I have ripped my complete 2000+ albums, cassettes , and cd's to mp3. I did the same for my wife's 500 or so cd's and then her father had his complete collection of 600 albums converted to mp3 and some to flac. I have this all zipped and stored on an old hard drive, waiting to be set up on a nas or something. Then there's the few thousand movies we've made into mp4s as well. Haven't even begun to scan all the 1000's of photo's my family has either. Probably talking several terrabytes of data I'll be working on for the rest of my life. How the heck to safely back all that up??? I really need to do some reading about all this!

I'm using a single NAS setup up as RAID 1 with two drives as my backup. RAID 1 keeps the same data synchronized on the two hard drives so they are mirror images of each other. When a failure of 1 drive is detected, an alarm sounds. You replace the damaged drive with a new hard drive and the NAS box set up as RAID 1 will then mirror the remaining good hard drive to the new hard drive. That's why my NAS with two 3TB hard drives only provides 3TB total storage - it mirrors the hard drives for redundancy. RAID 0 would "stripe" files across the two hard drives which would give you a total of 6TB of storage.

If the NAS box itself fails, you can either replace the NAS box, but using a different brand/model may not be compatible with the filesystem on the existing hard drives, or you can connect either hard drive to a computer running Linux and it will read the data on it.