Anybody Used Backup and Restore (Windows 7) on Windows 10?

In message snipped-for-privacy@news.individual.net>, Jeff Gaines snipped-for-privacy@outlook.com writes

I've been using it on a weekly basis for over 6 years, seemingly without any problem.

Adrian

Backing up is the easy bit, have you been restoring too?

I am going to have a play with this on a spare machine, I'll try both the Backup and Restore (Windows 7) and a recovery thumbdrive.

If I had used this spare machine for experimenting I wouldn't have broken my main machine of course :-(

I havn't used the image backup feature. I figure I am going to want to start with a clean install of windows if a system fails.

I have done a couple of restores. Seem to work OK. For me the main issue is managing backups. You have no control over when it starts a new backup "set". It appears its usually fine to delete each backup "set", each new one it creates contains everything that exists at that point.

Dave

In message <104df2h$230re$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, Pancho snipped-for-privacy@protonmail.com writes

Not recently.

Adrian

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In message <104di1j$23fnl$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, David Wade snipped-for-privacy@dave.invalid writes

The way that I use it is to do a separate back up each time, rather than try to do a set. I have a vague feeling that I tried doing that many years ago, but didn't get on with it. So long ago, that I can't remember what the issue was.

Adrian

Reminds me of Shakespeare...

― William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1

And that, sadly, is the problem.

It's hard to quantify what the purpose of the Microsoft product is.

When presenting info like this, there is always the danger of including FUD for nothing. Yet, collecting evidence is hard for this stuff, so who can say whether it's a "bargain in bad faith".

Short answer: Stop using that for disk imaging.

Macrium Reflect Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition AOMEI Backupper Standard (Notice no Easeus Freebie mentioned :-) )

are a safer bet for backups.

Macrium Reflect, the Free version can still be downloaded.

It comes a bit closer to being a disk imaging software.

To get the W7 Backup to get closer to a thorough backup, you have to use the diskpart.exe "Letter Assignment Trick" to get all the partitions with file systems to show up. When you do letter assignment to Hidden Partitions, not all subsystems honour the trick.

W7 Backup checks the GPT partition table for the "Critical Bit" in the GPT attributes. Critical partitions are backed up as part of the System Image minimal set. If you artificially made all the partitions critical, that improves the odds they would all get backed up.

Only two partitions are marked critical here, to ensure they are backed up. The W7 backup seems to know that ESP and C: drives are critical as well and are to be invited in, with a tick box.

Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.22621.1

Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. On computer: WALLACE

DISKPART> select disk 0 DISKPART> list partition

Partition ### Type Size Offset ------------- ---------------- ------- ------- Partition 1 System 100 MB 1024 KB EFI System Partition (Windows folder, Ubuntu folder, etc) Partition 2 Reserved 16 MB 101 MB 16MB boot track cache ??? NoFS. Not handled well by Linux GParted, Partition 3 Primary 118 GB 117 MB W11 C: Partition 4 Recovery 1024 MB 118 GB Windows recovery partition (emergency W11 boot) Partition 5 Primary 128 GB 119 GB W10 C: Partition 6 Recovery 1025 MB 248 GB Windows recovery partition (emergency W10 boot) Partition 7 Primary 682 GB 249 GB

DISKPART> select partition 1 DISKPART> detail partition

Attrib : 0000000000000000

DISKPART> select partition 2 DISKPART> detail partition

Attrib : 0000000000000000

DISKPART> select partition 3 DISKPART> detail partition

Attrib : 0000000000000000

DISKPART> select partition 4 <=== DISKPART> detail partition

Attrib : 0X0000000000000001

• Volume 4 NTFS Partition 1024 MB Healthy Hidden

DISKPART> select partition 5 DISKPART> detail partition

Attrib : 0000000000000000

DISKPART> select partition 6 <=== DISKPART> detail partition

Attrib : 0X0000000000000001 Offset in Bytes: 266796531712

• Volume 5 NTFS Partition 1025 MB Healthy Hidden

DISKPART> select partition 7 DISKPART> detail partition

Attrib : 0000000000000000 DISKPART> exit

But if a person is to use this as a Macrium Replacement, some sort of "hacks" or "tricks" will be needed to make the operation more complete. In particular, Partition 2 is hard to get backed up (since we don't understand the real reason it exists, we can't take chances on discovering later it should have been included).

Partition 2 is a NoFS partition, a 16MB bag of bits. A boot track on a modern (1MB multiples) disk, is only 1MB at most, and the boot track isn't even needed on a GPT disk drive. The GPT table already has a backup (up at the end of the hard drive) so that's not it either. Other excuses for that partition, make no sense. There have been multiple excuses for its purpose.

The partition 2 can be seen in Gnome Disk viewer, but the partition is not shown in Windows. Again, a lot of behaviors in software, are a function of NoFS, and only Macrium is smart enough to use "dd" to back up the 16MB of data, whatever the data represents. Commercial backup softwares do not place as much faith in "categories" like the Window 7 Backup does, and this makes them "more trustworthy as companions". They won't take their eye off the ball.

One user reported a bug against AOMEI, where the GPT Attribute was not handled properly. The user reported the bug to AOMEI and they fixed it. But this is some time after the AOMEI product was shipping -- any product can make mistakes, but in particular, I don't like to see users reporting bugs like this, after a product has been shipping for a couple years.

Without even testing the Restore (which I might have tried in the past), I cannot recommend this bucket of bolts, purely because of its design philosophy.

Note that, the Macrium Rescue CD (which the owner has to prepare using the program menu), it has a "Boot Repair" item on the CD. In the event a Bare Metal Restore does not boot, you can use that to fix it. The Boot Repair uses Microsoft utilities to restore boot. But, the Boot Repair does not have all the files to reload a broken ESP, and neither does the three-stage repair the OS attempts, seemingly include a set of those files. This means, it is possible to get in a pinch, where neither of the repair options work "easily".

You can define new boot materials with about four commands, and it may still be possible to repair such a mess.

This is a topic where *the user* does the test, because nobody cares about your data like *the user*.

It takes about one year of "casual test" to vet a backup software. Nobody wants to be starting with a stack of blank hard drives, and doing a test plan of everything in a compressed time period. But over the span of a year, you can try this and that, and prove to yourself the product works.

W7 Backup is bad enough, few people volunteer to do the Restore. I think I tried once, and I don't think it worked. But I didn't spend time "kicking it in the nuts" to see if it could be tipped upright again. It would need a lot more of my "casual" tests, before I would actually trust that thing. The appearance of the thing, scares me.

Paul

:-)

Amid all the discussion about backups, it may well be also worth considering retention times, and how long it might be worth keeping archive copies. Backups may well protect against system and hardware failures, but it can also be really useful to be able to look back at a file that has, for whatever reason gone missing, been mistakenly edited, become corrupted...

Chris

OK playing over.

The recovery thumbdrive restores the OS only, all your apps and data are wiped. To me that is useless, the only reason for using an image is to avoid the annoyance of having to activate Office (all my other software now uses sensible activation that just works) so it fails compared to Acronis True Image. (I have found a download for Macrium free and I will try it but it is no longer available from Macrium).

The Backup and Restore (Windows 7) fails because it won't write a back up to an external USB3 drive on my play machine although to be fair it did on the main PC but I don't want to risk a re-install on that in case it kills my software activations.

I need to do some more thinking but it seems there isn't a workable MSFT solution.

It's even worse than I thought. I had left it to restore but in fact it needs you there because it goes through the whole install process again from asking what keyboard you want so it has no advantages at all over a re-install.

What I found astonishing is that the old setup was legacy BIOS/MBR. It has wiped my NVMe (it was two partitions with all my data, including drivers, on the second partition) to a single UEFI/GPT drive and the contents of the second partition are lost for good.

I am really tempted to go use my 2 x Z170 as main PC and server, they both run Win 8.1 fine which gives me control over updates and I can use Acronis to image them. Better think about for a while.

I have been using it since 2017 but only to back up data files which seem to exist as (almost) annual sets (*).

After a big OS update (i'm on Win 10 Pro/32) I also backup the system images C and D, which takes ages because I backup to an external hard disk that is still on USB2.

Regular data backups are to networked MyCloud device, which also has a USB3 port to allow it to be further backed up.

Touch wood I have never had to restore any data.

This reminds me of a salient warning by Dave of Dave's Garage to grab a copy of the Win 10 media creation tool before October when it may vanish from the Microsoft website

(*) Does Win 7 backup effectively start every set with a full backup of every data file (and then backup files that have been changed or accessed).?.

If so, can I delete some of the sets dating back to 2017 ?

The middle portion of the picture, shows that after two System Image backups, there are two Persistent Differential Shadows on the machine. That could be how they handle differential backups.

In the bottom part of the picture, I access the Space Management, and I discover I get to retain the latest System Image, or, I can delete all the System Images. This implies some sort of monkey-business using the Shadows. Perhaps one option is to remove all the Shadows, the second option is to do that plus erase the WindowsImageBackup folder (which has the most recent copy). It is a recent copy via being a differential shadow, at a guess.

I was thinking initially, they would use differencing via the VHD or VHDX containers, but they don't seem to be doing that.

There is a limit of 64 shadows per disk, and if you keep using shadows like that ("persistent"), it is using up a limited resource. The other aspect, is the activity could cause "slow COW" (Copy On Write). Defragmentation can apparently make some adjustment.

Paul