USB explanation

Any tight fisted farmer anxious about inheritance tax!

Fully concur with that. Built in to W7 but 11 wants you to mortgage your life to the cloud:-(

And, en plus, I can have it backup in rotation to any number of extra mounted drives, at a cost of one click per extra drive.

But as an occasional backup device (i.e. not powered up and spinning all the time) a hard disk is far less likely to die suddenly.

That is a very questionable assertion

-- There is nothing a fleet of dispatchable nuclear power plants cannot do that cannot be done worse and more expensively and with higher carbon emissions and more adverse environmental impact by adding intermittent renewable energy.

Just power up W7 backup and click on "Change Settings" and enter your new backup device, then instead of letting Windows decide what to backup, click on "Let me choose" and click all the locations that you want to back up

Because for backups they generally don't fail without any warning at all.

er. The W7 box died! Hence my issues. Currently with a fixer but he pulled rather a long face when I carried it in.

Maybe. Anyway a £20 spinning disk is currently on the way!

Somewhere in the thread you mention email, contacts and calendar.

If these are in a Gmail or Microsoft account you can pull them down fresh from the Gmail or Microsoft servers (use IMAP for email, not POP3) although I don't know how long they keep calendar data.

The machine has a 500GB SATA drive in it. Like, 150MB/sec . How fast does it have to go, to do a backup ?

It's a pretty decent machine, not older dumpster material.

Operating System Windows 10 Pro (64-Bit) Installed RAM 8 GB GPU Intel UHD Graphics 630 Installed Storage 500 GB Ports 5 * USB-A 3.0 / 3.1/3.2 Gen 1 (500MB/sec?) 4 * USB-A 2.0 USB-C 1 * USB 3.1/3.2 Gen 2 <=== On the front panel (1GB/sec?)

Display I/O 2* DisplayPort 1.2 Audio I/O 1* 1/8" / 3.5 mm Headphone/Microphone Input/Output 1* 1/8" / 3.5 mm Line Output Keyboard USB Full-Size Keyboard with Number Pad Pointing Device USB Mouse Power Supply 200 W with

SSD Slots 1 x M.2 2280 SATA / PCle (Available) 1x M.2 2230 (E-Key) <=== room for Wifi, no idea about antenna cables

"M-key is for PCIe x4 / NVMe x4 or SATA. B-key is for PCIe x2 / NVMe x2 or SATA. E-key is for wifi "

For the money, and at high capacity, you can get 3x the backup storage for the price, from a hard drive. The large hard drives, the outer diameter is 285-300MB/sec and the hub down the end is 150MB/sec or so. I only own one drive of that description. The drive in the machine (I have lots of stuff that small), that's going to be at the lower end of the spectrum on the read channel.

And Macrium will only do 300MB/sec at the best of times, and that gives you a single file representation of an entire hard drive, with all boot sectors and such, intact. A large hard drive then, at least some of the time, is a good match to the task.

I own SSDs too, but they're not for backup. Three 4TB SATA drives for boot. And a lot of ankle biter 250GB SSD drives for scratch installs, which were $40 a pop.

Paul

Speed IS relevant. If it takes too long you will be tempted to do it another day. Hard drives can fail without warning - usually after they have been dropped. SSDs from reputable manufacturers are incredibly reliable. There are lots of Samsung 850PRO and 860PRO drives around on eBay in the smaller sizes like 256 or 512 Gbyte for £20 to £50.

Don't worry about the fact that they have been used. Consider this as "burn in". All the infant mortality failures will have happened so they are likely to be more reliable than new drives.

USB3 to SATA adapter cables are not expensive. There is no need for a housing if you use as SATA SSD.

John

Really? I thought God was agnostic about such things.

This is what you get when you buy a refurb. Something like WD Blue 500GB HDD.

Where have you been ?

The refurbisher does not wish to add expensive hardware to a machine which will have a low low retail price. The WD Blue I got in my refurb, developed CRC errors after only a few days usage.

Thus, if there is a SATA port and an NVMe connector, a refurbisher will install a SATA drive. They are attempting to build a minimally functional PC with an OS image on a single bootable drive. The customer, upon booting and concluding the machine is stable and is not crashing, that customer concludes they got their money's worth. They now have no issue with the seller.

it is up to the customer to add a NVMe and a new video card (that's assuming the 200W power supply has enough juice for *any* half-height half-length PCIe vid card). That could be about four hundred more, on top of a machine acquired for two hundred. I think you can see that "making a race horse out of an old nag" costs money.

I agree with your analysis that a HDD is not a good choice for W10/W11, a SATA SSD (even the one I got for 40 would do) or an NVMe (I have one of those too), could make a better boot drive.

For example, you could clone over to one of these. I don't even keep this in a PC. It's perfect for pictures though. Notice it is even the same capacity as the OPs hard drive.

This is what I use for scratch installs. Presumably available in 500GB versions too. If you really have to save money, this is one of the cheaper ways to get a faster boot cycle. That's why I use them.

Paul

You will be using commercial backup software.

Typical backup rates are around 300MB/sec when a fast processor is used. I might see 150MB/sec to 200MB/sec or so, on an *average* backup day.

A 1GB/sec storage device, while fun, would be mostly a waste. The HDTune benchmarks are not accurate (on W10/W11) as that's an old software and it needs tweaks to keep the speed corrected. The OS displays could be closer, yet the Samsung benchmark measures over 500MB/sec on the 4TB drive.

Sometimes the checksums or hash calculations that slow down a backup, there is an instruction in the instruction set to help.

If the operator of the Macrium backup turns on "medium compression", then that will cut into the rate. My picture was collected with compression off.

Crucial x8 Write Consistency

The second graph down, isn't exactly the test case I would want to run, and perhaps a check of write consistency on another site review will shed some light on that.

OK, now THIS is the trace I want. Crucial x8 red trace - drops to about 200 on a sustained write. The device actually uses QLC flash. The initial transfer rate is the pseudo-SLC cache area.

Like a box of Cracker Jacks, every portable SSD has a surprise inside.

There was another one of those that was drool worthy - as soon as I saw the write consistency trace the drool stopped immediately. Writing an inflated number on the tin, helps no one. Sooner or later (customer reviews), you get caught and the customers will report what it really can do.

SLC and MLC flash don't behave like that (the controller handles them differently), while TLC and QLC the writes are done at two levels. All you can get today, is TLC and QLC. A flash device at 8TB, pretty well is always QLC, as an example. The Crucial is only 2TB and is using QLC.

Paul

Yes, on Windows, we are *cursed* by having 30 commercial offerings for backup. At least three of those offer free versions capable of doing the "Full Backup Case", just like the Microsoft 'Windows 7 Backup" can do a full backup for you. Easeus, AOMEI, Macrium (one of the older versions, like Reflect 7 or Reflect 8 is good for W10/W11).

# To heck with graphics. This will backup everything on the drive, needed to boot the OS. # This is command line invocation of Windows 7 backup (System Image == allCritical)

wbAdmin start backup -backupTarget:N: -allCritical # AllCritical stands for ESP, C, System Reserved # N drive is the external

# If you specify too many drive letters (effectively ask it to back up C: twice), # it only backs up C: one time, like it should. Here, I've identified all partitions. # But this is "Windows 7 Backup" we're talking about though, not exactly friendly.

wbAdmin start backup -backupTarget:E: -include:C:,D:,F: -allCritical -quiet

A few revisions back, Acronis made a backup with very nice storyboarding, better than Macrium. But Acronis lost their minds and started making a "suite" instead, so you got backup but were burdened with their "AV". Their rent-seeking behavior (AV subscription) was their undoing. Today, they are hardly discussed as a backup option. Whereas their older stuff, there were some standout examples.

Raymondcc used to have an article, which was updated once with re-review material, which compares the performance of the programs. Some of the materials from that review have been archived. The information in this table now is dated (Macrium version is a lot higher than 5 now.) AOMEI was the fastest on a Full. And Easeus somehow managed to pull off an Incremental with blinding speed. There are more backup programs out there now, than when this table was made.

It is very much your responsibility as the customer, to test that the software works. This is why I have not tested 20-30 programs. I only tested the one I use, and that took about a year before I was satisfied. The Windows 7 Backup, yes, it works, but it does not inspire confidence. Does it have a hash check ? Um... You see, to even start such an adventure, you need a "tick box list of features". Does Microsoft care about the tick boxes ? Could they make a *f****ng user manual* for example. Macrium user manual PDF has a *ton* of pages. So do most of the serious commercial offerings (150-500 page manuals!). A manual is table stakes, in the backup game.

OK, let's see how fast windows 7 Backup can run the following command. D: is my 90GB ramdrive, should be enough room for a small backup.

wbAdmin start backup -backupTarget:D: -allCritical

2) Does Windows 7 have a "Verify" function like Macrium does ?

This is all part of calibrating a backup tool. Asking the questions.

Paul

The answer is... it depends.

I have two 40GB Maxtor drives, that both were a total loss. One stayed alive (but sick) for a day, and it did a "restart" at one point, and lost its identity. It was claiming it was a 40GB drive one minute, the next minute it said its name was "Falcon" and it was a 10GB drive (in other words, the "default" for the controller is to report it has one platter).

That drive was a nasty piece of work.

You are correct about later drives. They may show signs of "sickness". If you use passthru SMART or you use read benchmarks, you can typically get some amount of warning.

One drive I stopped using, it has been accessible for at least the last eight years, and shows no sign of getting worse on its own. It and similar model drives, were flaky pastry from the day I bought them. But, they did not die completely. They were showing statistics in SMART that said "you shouldn't use me any more" (reallocated around 300, still more of them left, could go to 5500). And I agreed with that.

Even an instance of that drive, without a lot of service hours on it, is headed the same way.

There is one other drive, not really all that much different than these flaky ones, also 500GB, it has a usage time of 55000 hours and has a flawless surface. Bench it, you'd swear it was (almost) new.

Somewhere between those two extremes, is the "average hard drive".

And it's too much text, to write up a treatise on Helium HDD. I own one. I hope I kept the receipt :-)

Drives up to and including 6TB, are air breathers. Drives 8TB to 24TB, are Helium (sealed) drives. No breather hole. The Helium drives may be cleaner inside, but the gas has a 5 year warranty.

Paul

Odd. All my refurb machines came with *new* SSDS. They are ex corporates and the condition of purchase in these cases is the existing hard drives get crushed...

No refurb machine is likely to have an NVME slot. Too new a feature.

If you want all that dint buy a refurb. This machines is a nice ex corporate HP low footprint design of the type that were sold in thousands to small businesses. The priocessiors is an I5, and the graphics are onboard intel. Its adequately fast and it came refurbished with an SSD (and windows, which I immediately overwrote).

A small SSD is peanuts cost wise.

Yes, cursed is the word. I have no interest in pissing about with something like backup which should be simple to use, both for setting up and later when you want to restore something, and should come with the OS.

Lenovo Computer ThinkCentre M720q Mini W11Pro Business i5 8400T,16GB DDR4, 512GB NVMe, WIFI, BT [REFURBISHED] $294

That machine then, is on the order of 6 years old, and not perfect for Win11. There's no MBEC entry in the specs. They only seem to include that line, if the value is "Yes", and not if the value is "No". But it can still run Win11, just a little slower without MBEC.

At one time, there was no mention of MBEC at all, on any processor. Then Intel went back and edited some of the entries.

the ark.intel.com site is a mess now, so it's harder to recommend as an easy place to look them up. The previous interface was perfectly usable.

The 35W CPU in that machine, means it is little better than a laptop, placed in a box.

Paul