Safe to rely entirely on Macrium to rescue the comp. from a crash?

cereberus said:

Plenty of good free alternatives to MR eg

Easeus Todo Backup

Aomei Backupper

Veeam

Actually, I have found MR to be so reliable, I never bother even validating the MR backup just accepting the risk that I might end up rreinstalling stuff. I backup my data separately.

Thanks. I am trying Easus Todo and Aomei Backupper. They are very similar to eachother: for daily backups they offer one backup per day (I'm going for Full backups). Presumably each of those is deleted and replaced by the new one. Therefore, if a fault in the C: drive occurrs before a backup is done, that backup will contain that fault. Therefore, going back to that backup will have no effect.

I found Veeam very intrusive, requrring a registration stage, and insisting on a phone number, so I have not looked further.

The advantage of Macrium is that you can set it to (for example) once per day and keep each one for three days. That gives you a chance to go back to a BU two or three days before the fault and get a faultless BU. (Of course, you could set Easus and Aomei to do a once per week BU. Going back to that would almost certainly avoid such a fault, but that BU would be out of date by up to a week.)

Therefore, can anyone recommend another BU utility that offers to keep daily backups for a few days (like Macrium does?)

( In case you are wondering, I know Macrium is very reliable, but I would be happier of I had another BU programgoing at the same time. Over the top I know, but that's me.)

My Aomei can do Daily backups. I think the disk space management isn't in the free version. Try the Pro. for that.

SIW2 said:

My Aomei can do Daily.

Yes, I can do that as well. What I was looking for was the ability of preserve the last three daily backups. This was in case of a fault on my C: drive, I needed to go back 2 to 3 days to get a clean backup.

Having searched more, I find that Easeus Todo can preserve some backups for a few days, which is what I am looking for. However, I need to test it over several days to confirm.

Todo works fine, but it is large. Just look for backupper pro giveaway. Ther is also an O&Odisk image pro giveaway for version 10.5 which supports win10.

Hi,

Since TS uses an UEFI system and assuming he has an external backup drive he can create a Fat32 partition of say 1Gb in size and use that to copy MR's rescue disk onto it. The Backup partition can then be formatted using the NTFS file system which allows for a single BU file.
To do this let MR create a Rescue ISO file, once mounted you then just select all files and copy these to the Rescue partition.

Test it to see if it boots and you're done.
For extra safety I use a small usb stick of about 4Gb as a spare MR Rescue medium as well.

MR never let me down, it's free and does all I need it to do.

Cheers,

Quick follow up questions:

1. When you restore a full image backup, does it put the computer to the exact same state it was at the time of backup? There is absolutely no difference on any level or in any way?

2. With malware/ransomware/viruses, my understanding is that restoring a clean backed up image will simply wipe out the infected image and then you are good. Are there any cases where this can fail? Assume the backup image media is not infected and the backup is clean - can a virus or malware for example interfere with or affect the boot up and not allow one to choose a way to boot up for example and then you can't load from the rescue disk?

Thanks.

Hi there

If you have a NAS server say running Linux you can use any number of the Linux tools for backing up. rsync is good but it's a complex command line. GRSYNC is a GUI version of Rsync

Advantage of rsync is that you can easily automate it (Linux CRONTAB).

other good Linux utilities

14 Outstanding Backup Utilities for Linux Systems

Having backups done by two different OS'es might be more complex but it certainly will be safer - the chances of BOTH OS'es going down at the same time aren't at all likely.

I backup Windows to external HDD with Macrium (running on the Windows system or the stand alone bootable version) and then nightly cron job copies windows data to NAS server.

If there is undetected malware on Windows it can't harm the Linux server as there's no way for it to execute even if it could execute an .exe file. Also don't give the (Linux) backup job root privileges either - run it as a specific non admin type of user that can only access a specific directory on the server.

Always have a "Clean" reference Windows OS image that you can restore - remember the latest backup could well have undetected malware -- no A/V software can ever be 100% effective -- even if it's 90% which is probably almost unachievable too --some stuff will get through - depending on users behaviour regarding emails, surfing, torrenting etc etc.

I always have a CLEAN image OS of the first CLEAN Windows installation - I make that disconnected from the Internet. That version I keep until the next windows release appears - then I make a new one if I'm satisfied with the new release.

I then regularly take nightly images of the Windows OS - but keep the reference one just in case.

If you do find malware on your system then you need to go back through each backup in turn -- I keep 5 full ones - I've oodles of HDD space. If say you still haven't got a clean system with your last backup (in my case the 5th one or oldest) restore your reference OS.

I'm not an advocate of using any A/V cleanser -- you can 100% NEVER guarantee the system is fully OK and often the time taken in attempting to clean an infected system can take HOURS or even DAYS - a 30 min restore is far simpler --on SSD might only be 10 mins to restore !!!!.

Cheers
jimbo