Best method of backing up over network? Windows 10 questions


  1. alexncfc
    Posts : 114
    Windows 10 Pro 21H1 (19043) x64
       New #1

    Best method of backing up over network? Windows 10 questions


    Hi all,

    I have a laptop and a desktop PC, and the desktop rarely gets much use if I am honest but I thought I had better start doing proper backups (I do do backing up, but only a sort of manual copying as and when type thing to a 500GB external drive I have) so I got myself a 2TB SATA drive to put into the desktop machine so that I can back up my laptop files to this over the (wireless) network.

    However I had a few questions:

    Is the tool called "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)" good enough for what I want to do, which is backing up my laptop files on a scheduled basis?

    What happens if my desktop PC is not switched on when the scheduled backup date on my laptop comes along?

    I can use the "System image tool" which creates an image of the entire used space of the drive, but the standard backup option also offers a tickbox option to create a drive image - does this mean it will be basically backing up my selected files (like Music, Videos, etc) as well as the disk image on top of that (and therefore a very long process) ??

    And lastly, with the above, I've been messing around and doing some test runs and noticed that it is VERY slow doing a disk image backup over WIFI - I'm guessing that I would get better speed doing a direct PC-to-laptop connection via network cable, but would it be easy to perform the backup over this? Will the PC and laptop automatically configure themselves to know that they can "see" each other and see my shared folders (these being the folders I share on the desktop that I do the backing up of files into from the laptop)?

    Forgot to add: does the Windows 10 (7!) backup tool do any sort of compression when it is backing up, or is it a direct copy process?

    I hope this makes some sort of sense! I want to get to a stage where this sort of thing is just happening in the background on a monthly basis and I don't need to worry about tinkering with it.

    Thanks for any assistance.
      My Computers
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  3. Samuria
    Posts : 8,111
    windows 10
       New #2

    Windows image gives lots of problems your far better using a free disk image tool most of which have options to compress data. Over the network depends on your network if it's gigabyte using cable would be faster if it's only 100 meg and you have fast wireless it could be quicker if your wireless is n type max speed is 300 meg if it is AC it's 3 gig. Don't forget to create a bootable rescue disk from the imaging software so you can restore. For docs photos use ms OneDrive or Google drive it will backup to the cloud on its own
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  4. Josey Wales
    Posts : 26,453
    Windows 11 Pro 22631.3527
       New #3

    I would use the free version of Macrium Reflect, it works great and better than the Windows built in one.

    Macrium Software | Your Image is Everything
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