TOT backup software

Jun 16, 2021 Last reply: 5 years ago 8 Replies

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alan_m 5 years ago

Recommendations for backup software for a win10 PC to network drive - with the possibility of cloning the disk.

I have been using acronis for many years but their (paid for) 2021 version now includes virus/ransomware protections etc. some of which cannot be disabled. I believe this upgrade is responsible for slowing down the start-up of my machine. Task manager shows that acronis is taking a large percentage of CPU time for 30+ seconds on start-up. A web search shows many people complaining about the same and despite acronis suggesting that the latest modified upgrade allows disabling some of their new features this doesn't stop it hogging resources on start-up.

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Information here may be outdated?

jon 5 years ago

For simplicity and compact software to build disk images, you don't have to go beyond 'Disk Snapshot' by Tom Ehlert. I have used it for many years.

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Paul 5 years ago

There are several free ones.

Since Microsoft has a backup, and it does "full" backups rather than "incremental" or "differential", the other companies tend to give away their "full". The more efficient "incremental" or "incremental forever" modes, those require purchase rather than the free version.

Like foreign beer, this is an acquired taste. Recent Acronis are relatively streamlined, compared to this. Still, this is what I use.

Click the "Home User" button.

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It does backups. It clones. It has an emergency boot CD (necessary for a bare metal restore, like everyone else).

Click with your mouse, to magnify the filmstrip here. This is a set of tutorial pictures, intended to show an excess of features on Macrium. Nobody actually does backups with all these steps - this just shows the setup you create can be saved and reused tomorrow if you want. It's to give some idea just how complicated-looking this is, compared to Acronis.

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Macrium6_Backup.gif

Other freebies would be perhaps AOMEI and there's Easeus I suppose. The Easeus one used to be packed with some adware, but the adware is disarmed. I don't know if a scanner picks that up and quarantines it or not.

Page2 here has some timings. The review is rough on DriveImageXML, but DriveImageXML was more of a tech demo than a product. It might have been an early attempt to use VSS.

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What slows Macrium down, is generating a "checksum" for the MRIMG, as it iw written out. This caps the max rate it can run (with compression off). If you had a 4GB/sec SSD and were backing up to a 4GB/sec SSD, Macrium might do 300MB/sec on a fast machine. If there had been an option to remove the checksum (no, this is not a good idea), it probably would have screamed. That checksum has saved my ass a few times, by alerting me to hardware problems on the computer. I had bad RAM, and it ruined several backups. The checksum caught it.

Paul

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Robert 5 years ago

I'm using Macrium Reflect 7, it works ! It does a weekly image to my WD network drive without issues. I also sync my normal files to the cloud using pcloud.

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