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Backup and Restore

4K views 52 replies 11 participants last post by  storm5510 
#1 ·
"Backup and Restore" makes a reference to "Windows 7." This suggests there is a different way to make drive backups. Is there?
 

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#2 ·
Of course there is, third party backup and restore suites, and that's what Microsoft has been officially recommending you use since Version 1709, when they deprecated the core component of their very old (hence the Windows 7 designation) built-in utility, which was never the best option to begin with:

Microsoft Announcement of Deprecated Features, including SIB [Backup and Restore (Windows 7)]

I certainly wouldn't want to wake up one morning after a Windows Update to find that the utility I'd been using to take backups no longer exists, and eventually that will happen.
 
#3 ·
I never used it until I had more than one system to back up. I have a lifetime license for Acronis TrueImage 2018. This is only for one machine. I have a support account with them. I think I will contact them about adding on. I have used it, in several forms, since 2009. It has always done an excellent job.
 
#4 ·
Acronis is an excellent product but, as you noted, it does not have a free version.

If they will not allow you to get a multi-machine license extension, or the cost is too high, there are scads of alternatives that can be had at no cost provided one is backing up a personal (as in non-business-use) computer.

EaseUS To Do Backup, Paragon, and Macrium Reflect (and plenty of others) have free backup and recovery suites for non-commercial use.

My personal experience is that once you've used one, using any other is pretty much a piece of cake.
 
#6 ·
#10 ·
I totally disagree! System Image is the BEST backup in my book. I've been using it for YEARS every week or ten days. I've had to restore an image 4 times in the last 20 years!
PERFECT! I don't care what the "doom and gloom" people say! I'm on Windows 10 Pro 64bit and wouldn't use any thing else!!!!
 
#15 ·
I contacted a rep on Acronis' support forum. There is a feature in TrueImage which can be used to create a bootable rescue media on a compact disc. The rep basically said I could use this CD on any machine I wanted to. The OS on the disc is Windows PE. Since I made the one I have on my Windows 10 desktop, it takes on that appearance. On the CD is the backup and restore utilities. I have used it in the past to create hard drive images of other machines on an external USB hard drive. TrueImage is not very good at creating file names so I change them to be unique to each system.

I replied to the rep that there are times when the media CD fails to start properly. They track usage by private IP addresses. It also could be that if it is unable to make an internet connection, it might or would refuse to start. I seem to remember a set of generic network drivers being a part of creating the backup CD, but I am not sure.

I went over everything in the above paragraph in my reply to the rep. Now, I will wait and see what his reply will be.
 
#17 ·
The feature in Acronis True Image to make a bootable CD can also make a USB Flash drive. If your CD doesn't work all the time, you will want a USB Flash Drive. Also, most new computers are no longer including CD/DVD drives. CD's can get scratched or other issues. Flash drives can be formatted and re-used.
To best way to create an image file of your system is to do it outside of Windows, so that is why you would want to boot to outside media and not the HDD to run the program to create an image.
Your USB Flash drive or CD can be used on as many computers as you want
 
#18 ·
After another follow-up message from the Acronis rep, and from my own research, I learned that any Acronis version post-dating the initial release of Windows 10 will not work on a Windows 7 system. End of story. I feel this was a really bad decision on their part. I never had a Windows 10 setup which would run, without issues, until the 19xx series came out. Since, it has been smooth sailing. I completely skipped the 18xx series. I ran Windows 7 Pro x64 on my i7 desktop for 15 months.

I have four computer systems. I have been a contributor to a prime number research project since 2005. This collection consists of three desktops and one laptop. One desktop is the i7 i mentioned which runs Windows 10 Pro x64. The others, two desktops and one laptop, are all older and all run Windows 7 Pro x64. I don't use the laptop much at all. Mostly, it stays in its padded case. I have no backup drivers for this laptop so having a reliable way to restore it, if needed, is important.

With Acronis off-the-table for the Windows 7 systems, I must rely on something else. It has been the built-in backup utility up until now. I had to do a restore on one system several months ago. It worked very well. I tried another backup/restore product called "Paragon" a couple of years ago. It seemed to work alright, but I was not comfortable with it. Currently, they are nearly exclusive to business and database products.
 
#19 ·
You could try the other free backup utilities on your Windows 7 computers; for example: Macrium Reflect and EaseUs To Do Backup. If the latest versions of those one don't work on Windows 7, you could use their older versions instead, specifically the last versions that supported Windows 7. This is the bane of using an unsupported OS. Over time, more and more software will follow suit and stop supporting abandoned OS.
 
#23 ·
Cloud backup is a somewhat step against Ransomware. External unplugged media is best. If a user also has an internal, changing the extension of important files is a small step, but the "bad guy" could just reformat the thing.
 
#24 · (Edited)
I decided to go with EaseUS. Before doing so, I installed it on one of my Windows 7 machines and had it make a recovery disk ISO. The CD booted alright on that machine. I tried it on my Windows 10 system. Again, no boot problems. It took on the appearance of Windows 7, which was not an issue. So, it's installed on all four machines now and I have backups of all on the external HD.

The one caveat, for me, is the brilliant white background. It makes it difficult to see and read. Because of that, I didn't do the first backup right. I did a "disc" backup when I should have done a "system" backup. Its compression is excellent and went fast on the desktops. The laptop took more time. The Windows 7 systems seldom change so I won't need to run it on them very often. Anyone running Windows 10 knows it is in a state of flux almost on a daily basis. I always run a backup after a major update. These are the ones which a restart is required to finish.

Acronis was not hard to uninstall, but it left a lot of footprints behind. Getting those cleaned up took some time, but I got them all.

About the external HD. I swapped the drive out with a different model. The original drive in the enclosure was a WD Green 500 GB. I have a utility called CrystalDiskInfo. It displays all the SMART data in a somewhat easier to understand format. It reported that drive had one reallocated sector. This was a red-flag to me. It didn't have a hundred hours on it yet. I replaced it with a 1TB WD Blue which I had stored away. It didn't have any problems of this type and I had used it on-and-off for several years.

I am considering getting a large capacity USB Sandisk. I can get a 250GB for about $35 USD. I could run the backups directly onto it, and then copy them to the external HD. I am a big believer in redundancy.
 
#26 ·
Very good.

That being said, if you're taking backups on removable media (and a USB backup drive is removable), and storing copies on more than one device, at least one of those devices should ideally be stored somewhere that the computer, the source of said data, is not.

Heaven forfend one should have a fire, flood, tornado, or other calamity in one's home or office, but if you do, and all your backup media is stored there along with the source computer(s), you've then likely got nothing.
 
#28 · (Edited)
I had to go to Wally-World this morning to get Cat Levi some food. While I was there, I decided to check out their Sandisk collection. They had only one 256GB Cruzer Glide. That's what I needed.

Keeping the Sandisk updated will be a bit of a chore because the write speed is rather slow. The Windows 10 backup is 30 megabytes long. I started copying it. The status indicated it would take 1 hour and 25 minutes. To verify integrity, I wrapped the backup in an uncompressed WinRAR archive. It calculates a checkum and stores it in the archive header. I think doing this will be an evening TV watching job so I won't sit and stare at it. All three of the Windows 7 backups are far smaller. The stick had a FAT32 format. I did a quick format to NTFS. I couldn't copy anything to it with FAT32.

I nearly forgot. I put a 14" lanyard on the stick. I won't be confusing it with two other smaller capacity ones I have which look identical.
 
#30 ·
It seems that the file system format on all flash media varies widely depending on exactly who made it, when, and how long it's been sitting around on the shelf.

Most of what I've purchased recently (which is some months ago) was coming in as FAT32.

It doesn't really matter what it comes in as, since you can reformat to exFat, which is a very good idea since that can be handled by Linux, OSX, and Windows 10 (and I think 8, but I'm not sure about 7).

Personally, I do not like using flash media for any kind of important backup. It's not that I find it fails frequently, as I have ancient drives that still work fine, but when it fails it tends to fail without warning and, if any recovery is needed, it's much more difficult (you generally need a pro) compared to a good, old-fashioned spinner. I feel the same way about SSDs as backup media, too, for the same reason. I've never had a HDD fail without giving many indications that something is amiss, and usually over an extended period, before it finally croaks. Speed is not of the essence for me as far as either taking backups or performing restores, but long term stability of data and lack of unpredictable failure in the backup media are really important.
 
#32 ·
When it comes to external HDDs, I don't touch Seagate, WD, Toshiba and Samsung built ones! I have had the highest failure rates with those brands. I haven't had the same issues with Transcend built ones since I switched over a decade ago, which do use WD blue HDDs in them. I have no problem with internal WD drives though, in fact, they are my #1 brand. Transcend's external drives have some shock-proofing which is extremely handy in external HDDs. Alternatively, you could buy a good enclosure and a 2.5" HDD then build your own custom external HDD. Enclosure options are many.
 
#33 · (Edited)
Everyone's experiences with HDDs, mixed together and taken as a whole, would probably result in them all being the same (with the exception of certain models - we all know that there have been occasional problems).

Toshibas are far and away my favorite, and I've never had an issue with a single one until they failed either from age or accident (I'm talking external here).

The Wikipedia article on HDDs is a good (long) read. But one of the key points is no matter what brand you love, several others are from the same maker. HDD manufacture is much like department stores - the May Company owns most of the names we here in the USA are familiar with. Brands were bought for their name recognition, but the entity behind several brands is the same. The Wikipedia article on the History of HDDs covers the mergers of the various makers into the current "big three" in blow-by-blow detail, with timeline.

This is the most telling bit:
 
#34 · (Edited)
Something I just remembered from many years ago. I bought an off-the-shelf HP from Staples in 2004. This was back in the Windows XP days. The hard drive was a Maxtor 345GB. Yes, an odd size. It had a Pentium 4 CPU.

It ran well for the first six months. I was doing a lot of video back then so the system using the swap file was common. The drive activity light would come on and stay on for several minutes at a time. At the time, I didn't think much about it.

This went on for quite a while longer. I noticed the system performance was slowing. One day I was writing a MS Word document, if memory serves. I click the save icon at the top and the screen goes black. A message: "General failure error writing to drive C:" or something similar.

I cut the power and laid the case down on its side. I removed the side cover. The amount of heat coming out was rather amazing. I touched the hard drive and it burned my fingers. I used an oven mitt to get it out. I had to lay it in an aluminum pan on my kitchen stove. The drive had baked itself to death.

The next day I took the top cover off the drive. The spindle hub was discolored. One might think that reaching in and turning the spindle would result in it spinning a short time. In this case, about five revolutions. The spindle was too tight. So, the motor had to work harder to keep it going. Thus, the heat. I never bought another Maxtor drive. The first computer I ever bought had a Seagate drive, so that's what I went with for years.

Currently, I have seven WD drives ranging in sizes from 250GB to 2TB. How I ended up with so many, I am not sure. Two are boot drives in my Windows 7 systems. Two others are in external USB enclosures. There is one in my Windows 10 system acting as an auxiliary to the SSD. It is blank. The WD Green is a secondary in a Windows 7 system. This is the one with a reallocated sector. I suspect it came from the factory this way. I've been working it pretty hard to see if the reallocated count goes up. So far, it has not. This is probably a function of time more than anything else. I think I will let this go and remove the drive into a storage box.

Edit: All the WD drives I mentioned above are standard internals. Two have been placed in enclosures by me.
 
#40 ·
I am going to go off-topic here just slightly. What about SSD's? I have a Samsung EVO Plus 970 250GB in this desktop. I've seen lists of "don'ts" regarding these. Don't defrag. Don't wipe free space, and so on. I must clear the browser trash several times a week. If I didn't, all of that would simply take the device over, eventually.

I really feel Windows 10 was written to be ran from one of these. Run it from a mechanical, be prepared to wait several minutes. With the SSD, the login screen appears in just a few seconds. Complete load is less than 30 seconds.

I has functioned flawlessly since I put it in this past February.
 
#42 ·
Also, reading a couple of articles of the "HDD vs SSD" type will help to clear up the differences between the two and why certain practices (specifically defragging) which are needed secondary to exactly how a HDD stores and retrieves data, and which involve read/write heads seeking blocks, simply do not apply to SSDs.

I am presuming that Erasing and "Deleting everything" (or just deleting) are synonymous. It tends to be very hard to get many to understand that deleting something does not remove all traces of it, and it can be reconstructed until the space that was used to store it happens to get assigned for storing something else and is overwritten.
 
#47 ·
Cloning is a perfectly fine solution if you have drives to spare. You cannot use a cloned drive for anything else.

There's a very good reason that system imaging became the norm, and that's because it maximizes the storage potential for external backup drives. I have both a 2TB Toshiba Canvio and 4TB WD external backup drive, both of which are used in alternation as the backup media for 5 separate computers.

I don't have 5 drives to spare, and particularly ones that would be plug-n-play for all of the different systems (one desktop and four laptops) lying around that I could, or would, want to spare.
 
#50 ·
I was successfully able to clone my SSD onto a mechanical. I changed the boot order in the BIOS to attempt to boot from the mechanical. After 10+ minutes of waiting, I pressed the reset button. I used the WD Green drive. After doing some checking, I found that this particular model is designed for a CCTV security type system. I should have read the fine print before I ordered it. It worked fairly well in a USB2 external enclosure. So, it may go back to that use.

I repeated the clone experiment on a much faster WD Blue drive. SATA3, 7200 RPM. The boot was around six minutes. Too long. I've gotten use to the sub 30 seconds with the SSD. All of this is a confirmation of what I wrote earlier about MS designing later releases of Windows 10 to be ran from a SSD device.

I found something in EaseUS which further sold me on it. On the main screen, it displays the current backup set. In the "Advanced" drop-down on the right side is an option, "Check Image." This is a feature Acronis has. Having a backup image is useless if it will not restore properly, or boot properly when it is restored.

Something in EaseUS which does not seem to be flexible. Example: If my SSD is 500 GB and my target device is 250 GB, it's no go, even if the actual amount of data on the SSD is 25 GB. Acronis would do this. If my target device is larger, EaseUS will create the exact partition size as the backup and leave the rest usallocated. I learned this while working with the "green" drive. It is 500 GB. 99% of the time, I would replace a failed drive with another of the same capacity.

This brings up something else. Actual drive capacities. My SSD is advertised as 250 GB. The system info says 232 GB, and 249,382,825,984 bytes. I guess Windows does some rounding as the byte value divided by the GB value does not divide evenly. If I had to replace the SSD, and I chose another brand with a slightly smaller byte count, The restore probably would not work.

I looked at a review of Macrium Reflect. When I came across something which seemed to indicate that it does not create bootable partition images, I stopped reading. How accurate this is, I do not know.
 
#51 ·
Six minutes is too long even for an HDD. Before I switched to an SSD on my 2013 (3rd gen) ProBook, i used to get about 2 minutes, from power button press to idling on the desktop, and that was on a WD Blue 5400rpm drive. A link to that review would be helpful in vetting that claim. If you image the Windows partition only, then that system won't boot until further action is taken to create a system partition and populate it with the necessary boot configuration data. In other words, on a typical Windows installation, you need not just the Windows partition, but the system partition as well. The system image backup option in most backup software is meant to automatically identify the Windows partitition and the system partition and select them for imaging, so that less advanced user wouldn't face the hassle of figuring out which partitions should be imaged to ensure the target drive is bootable upon restoration of the image.
 
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