Best back up method

I had to restore my 893GB image which contains my OS and all the games I've downloaded. I had it on my PCI-e gen3 NVMe drive and was restoring it to my 4TB PCI-e gen4 NVMe. Was quite impressed only took about an hour.

I had attempted to restore it from my external SSD drive but cancelled that as it was going to take ages.
 
I would recommend backing up in 2 places one of which should be offsite (cloud) and the other in your external drive. Also, I wouldn't do real time back ups as beside the resource cost, 1 accidental deletion of a important file/folder would cause issues.

I backup my stuff 3 times (all automated). I back up 100% of everything onto my local server daily, 50ish% of semi-important stuff is further backed up weekly from my server onto a nas at my brothers and 3% of very important stuff is further backed up monthly onto a cloud provider (encrypted using duplicati).
 
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Yeah if stuff is important to you
Back it up to as many places as you can
Also check if your image backup software
Has a feature like macrium image guardian
And turn it on
It prevents deletion or alteration of your images

One reason I like my 011d xl
You have hot swap bays
So you can easily isolate one set of backups
When not in use

Hopefully one day pc cases will somehow
Have hot swap m2 bays
Restoring/creating images with m2 nvme is just so fast
Compared to sata ssds
But there's no simple way to disable m2 like sata
 
Bazzards said:
Hi Guys

Following a bit of a nightmare with my computer being unusable for the day, due to an update that went awry, I am looking for a back up solution. I would only need to back up a single 1tb drive. What would be the best solution?

I have some spare 3.5 inch hard drives and an external enclosure for connecting these to my pc via usb, but perhaps there are better solutions.

Thanks

Just to add, in would be a mirror of the drive in question so should Windows go awol again, I can re-install from a backup.
Click to expand...

I spent many years backing up data for a company. The one thing I learnt in that was not to trust exotic solutions. Keep it very simple and have at least two backups. Try not to make it dependant on any app or any hardware or other company. Over many years, anything can fail and usually does.
For small amounts of data, it's perfectly fine to just have two backup external drives. Always two. Alternate them so you always have the older backup on one drive.
Clone the entire drive if you like. Simple and very effective.
 
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My backup is as follows:
a Onedrive "copy" (immediate change) - Good for drive failure etc, but not for accedental deletion etc.
a Duplicati backup on a different onedrive account - This allows you to configure how long to keep changes, e.g. backup daily, but keep a monthly copy for 6 months, a weekly copy for 4 weeks etc. This is good for accedental deletions etc. It effectively stores the "differences", so you're not doing a full copy every backup.
 

EaseUs Todo backup looks decent enough. Keep meaning to try the free version out.​


Edit: not sure what has happened the text formatting above :confused:
 
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Bazzards said:
Hi Guys

Following a bit of a nightmare with my computer being unusable for the day, due to an update that went awry, I am looking for a back up solution. I would only need to back up a single 1tb drive. What would be the best solution?

I have some spare 3.5 inch hard drives and an external enclosure for connecting these to my pc via usb, but perhaps there are better solutions.

Thanks

Just to add, in would be a mirror of the drive in question so should Windows go awol again, I can re-install from a backup.
Click to expand...
If you're prepared to pay for backup software go for Macrium Reflect. If not, Veaam.

Do not, in any circumstances, pay for Acronis - my experiences of it have been dreadful and by all accounts it's now even worse.
 
Anyone using Minitool Shadow maker ?

Did a few speed tests using the software listed below backing UP 4.5gb Mkv video file from my c drive SDD to 3.5 HDD internal

Minitool Shadow maker. 29 secs
Aoemi Backupper. 38 secs
Ease US. 49 secs
Macrium Reflect. 51 secs
Veaam . 1 min 30 secs

I did Veaam twice, but the result was the same first run on Macrium Reflect took 1m.47s first it was testing the write speed second run took 51 secs.

Might be different if you're backing a whole drive up I'm new to all this, but I need to sort something lost the entire contents of my C Drive last week :(
Putting everything back on is a real pain.

edit ~: backing up entire c drive 83 GB took

Macrium Reflect 6 min 02 secs
Aoemi Backupper 6 min 38 secs
Ease US 7 min 08 secs
Veaam 7 min 33 secs
Minitool Shadow maker 8 min 45 secs

I guess the 4,gb test is not really a fair comparison
 
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Just checked the compressed file sizes, I went with default settings for all.


Macrium Reflect 39.8 gb
Aoemi Backupper 40.6 gb
Ease US 44.8 gb
Veaam 41.1 gb
Minitool Shadow maker 47 gb

Macrium Reflect reminds me of windows disk manager file sizes might explain why minitool came last then.


I like the interface of Minitool , Ease US , Aoemi they seem idiot-proof enough :)


Minitool , Ease US are free at the moment for what I need to do Veaam only always one job it seems on the free version easy to use though.
 
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