What do the people recommend as a backup system for a single PC?
I have tried Norton Ghost (discontinued), Acronis True Image (replaced by Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office - too much unnecessary content) and Macrium Reflect (far too complicated).
I don't need cloud backup. I just need a simple system to create incremental backups on an external disc and preferably be able to restore to a new PC if necessary (I believe this is known as bare metal restore). Could Windows be trusted with the job?
Use dd or gnu ddrescue in conjunction with a USB bootable copy of linux. These will make a bit-exact copy of the whole of your disc onto another drive which must be at least as large as the one you are backing up. It is quite a fast way of doing backups because the data is streamed in large blocks without needing to untangle file systems as part of the process.
For example: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M status=progress would do nicely. Always triple check the names of the source and destination drives to avoid disaster!
gnu ddrescue is good if the drive you are copying from is defective as it will recover as much as possible without wearing the drive out too much before working hard on the bad bits.
John
I use Macrium Reflect + blinkers. That is, I ignore the options and let it get on with it.
But I also:
a. use it only for the system partitions: my data is dealt with separately (by SyncBack Free); and
b. don't bother with incremental: a full image doesn't take long with modern processors and storage with ordinary compression.
A varient of that - I use EaseUS Todo Backup to clone the drive to another that's identical. Takes about 15 minutes to clone the boot partition. And on the rare occasions that I've had a problem I've swapped the drives over and rebooted in about five minutes.
You have a couple of different requirements by the sounds of it. Bare metal restore can be useful for disaster recovery, but is often less useful than you might expect, since often the disaster you are trying to recover from involves restoring data onto new hardware - which is unlikely to be compatible with the low level setup required by the previous machine.
Sometimes a backup strategy that virtualises the current platform to allow it to be restored to a VM hypervisor makes more sense since it breaks the link to the existing hardware.
(modern imaging tools have got better at letting you access files from the backup without restoring the entire image)
Note also that image or bare metal backups alone are not really backups in the true sense since they are not well suited to getting back that file that you corrupted three weeks ago and only just noticed. You may now find you have lots of ways of restoring a faithful copy of the file and the corruption. Generational backups help here. This is something that is quite good with many cloud based backups - backing up changed files and making all previous versions available for restore.
Generally backup that happen without user interaction are good - they get done that way!
I have used 'Drive Snapshot' for years, its so straight forward. Stores an image as an .sna file compressed and encrypted.
+1 Use Macriun Reflect for System partition to network drive with Verify option, scheduled for once a week. My "document" files and some photos etc are auto backed up to pcloud , I pay to get loads of storage, undelete option and good customer support. I know there are plenty of free Cloud storage solutions but feel that there of more chance of a paid for service surviving longterm
does that work if the source HDD/SDD and the destination HDD/SSD have different file systems like NTFS to Ext 4 or Reiser to Ext5?
Also does it work on LVM's (logical volumes)?
It works in all those situations because the destination drive ends up an EXACT copy of the source so long as it is big enough. In other words, it doesn't matter what file system was on the destination drive because that file system will be completely destroyed and replaced with whatever was on the source drive. This may not be what everyone wants, but I think it is a good way of doing full backups. Some of the advantages are:
1) It is free 2) The tools needed to restore the data will never go away. DD existed (1987) when Windows had barely been thought of and will always be around. There will always be ways of doing raw copies. 3) It is complete. You don't need to think of all the obscure directories that some of your data might accidentally have been stored in. 4) It is fast. There is no intelligence, no unscrambling of file systems. Its just a raw copy of everything on the source drive including any low level structures like LVMs and filing systems.If your hardware has died, you can probably find another equivalent machine that will boot from your backup. If you can't, you may be able to create a virtual machine environment that can. If that doesn't work it will almost certainly be possible to find a way of mounting the filing system on some environment that lets you recover the data that matters to you.
Something else that is really useful is the ability to protect yourself from data recovery tools. Suppose that you about to use some tool that mends a broken filing system. There is a good chance that the tool you have chosen will fail in some way leaving you in an even greater mess. If you have created an exact image of your drive then when that mess happens you can copy the image back and have another try with a different tool. Never try to run dd or gnu ddrescue under Windows using Cygwin when trying to fix a broken machine. If the machine reboots for any reason Windows will see the drive you are trying to save to and try to fix the partially recovered file system which is the last thing you want.
These comments are based on many years of making mistakes and trying to learn from them. I'm sure plenty of people will disagree to varying degrees. However, there is nothing quite as good as an exact image of the original drive. It preserves all options for recovery. dd or ddrescue booted from a USB stick is as good as it gets for saving data in a way that can be recovered any time in the future.
However, doing backups of the directories that you think are important in a way that allows more instant recovery is good too. Diversity is good. Convenience is essential otherwise the backups won't happen often enough. Don't forget rsync. Don't forget how cheap disc drives are now, especially if you buy a few used ones from eBay. Get a desktop USB3 drive caddy so that you can conveniently plug in a bare drive for your next backup.
John
And its now a subscription system.
It does work but I dont like the features, too limited imo.
Best approach is an older True Image before it got too compicated imo.
Those don't do the incremental backups he wants.
Doesn't do the incremental he wants.
If you can do a full backup quickly and easily then maybe incremental isn't that important. If you really need an incremental backup then do that as well as a full one.
John
The difference is that the best incremental backups will do that while you continue to use the system as you usually do and that means that the backups always get done.
That defeats the massive advantage of incremental backups that happen when you are using the system as you normally do.
No it doesn't. Nothing stops you from doing incremental backups whenever you want to. However, there is nothing as simple and reliable as a full drive image *. You can do both. Incremental backups are more likely to go wrong than one single copy of the whole drive. When did you last verify that the chain of incremental backups you have done would actually let you recover the file you need?
John
But the point is that fully automatic incremental backup while you are continuing to use the system as you normally do ensures that the backup always does get done. Nothing else does that.
But well done backup software doesnt go wrong.
When I discovered that I needed to go back to a file I had changed or which had got mangled somehow.
And that is very common with laptops.
Op 24/11/2022 om 14:37 schreef Scott:
Good ol' fashioned rsync.
Well if you are imaging so you can do a bare metal restore and want incremental restores you really need two types of backup.
The Windows/7 backup/restore which is still in 10 & 11 will create a system image will let you do a bare metal restore, but its an image, so you can't see the files in it, and can't do incremental backups.
You can also do incremental backups using the same tool so you can do a full restore.
I used to use a scheduled "robocopy" to do incremental file level backups. Its pretty good at this.
Dave
I use Time Machine on a Mac and that can do a full restore or incremental. I'm currently using Carbon copy cloner on a MAc to do a cline or a HD to SD card and then the SD card to a HD
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