What hard disk copy/backup utilities do you recommend? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 09:44:31 am
content: OK it's that time again, when my work HDD is getting pretty full and anyway it's been a while since I made a backup.The work drive is 300GB 2.5" SATA (in a removable tray.) It has no OS-involvement, and all utils on it are 'portable apps'. It's NTFS, but some other drives/partitions I use are FAT32.Today I bought a couple of 2.5" 1TB drives (one to replace my work drive, and one as a spare.) Also recently acquired four 3.5" 1TB sata drives, to use as rotating backup copies.But... I've learned from many sad experiences over the years, that the only safe backup is an absolutely standard file system drive. Anything using 'backup utilities', RAID arrays, or anything else that doesn't result in a perfectly standard HDD structure readable in any PC, is guaranteed by Mr Murphy to be a disaster. Whatever you used to create any non-standard data record, won't be available or working when you actually need it.The only good backup, is one you can stick in an external USB dock on any other PC, and read as a plain old hard disk.This excludes utils that make 'drive image files', or any other kind of compression or custom files.So the plan is:- Make a complete work drive file structure backup on one (or two) of the 3.5" drives, via a USB external dock.- Then do some tidying up of the work drive. Using space allocation visualization tools like Overdisk to locate files that are large and unimportant.- Then make a full work drive copy on the new 2.5" HDD, and swap it with the 300GB drive in the tray.- In future, do a full copy to one of the 1TB 3.5" drives every couple of weeks (ha ha, like I'll actually remember.)Of course trying to do a plain copy of large filesystems using Windows explorer is a total waste of time. It never works, always stalls over some stupid problem or other, screws up file date attributes, omits odd files like S & H, and can't be resumed after problems.The util I've used for a long time is ZtreeWin (a windows version of the venerable XtreeGold.) It's far better than MS explorer, but it too can sometimes stall if there are any file system funnies like malformed file names or path lengths exceeding some maximum. And it doesn't have facility to correct such issues and resume. So any problems can require starting over, and waste an incredible amount of time.For drive formatting I use the Windows system Disk Management util, which is good enough for that use.I only ever backup one partition at a time, but if I have room on the backup drive I'll make folders named like 20181030_C, 20181030_D, 20181030_E, etc. My work and backup drives are always just one partition, never a primary.Backing up boot/system partitions is a separate issue, and does require partition images etc. Not discussing that here.So, does anyone know of a filesystem copy util, that is freeware, a portable app (no 'install'), handles TB size drives, allows resume after encountering problems, handles both FAT32 (old drives) and NTFS via USB external docks (IDE and SATA HDDs) and runs in both WinXP and Win7. Also works to & from NAS drives, hopefully.Something you can just walk away from and leave alone for however long it takes, is essential. Keeping a log of problems and their full paths would be nice.Edit to add:Oh, need I mention that anything involving remote services, the Cloud, subscription fees, or software that has to have a net connection or phones home or times out, can f*ck right off.I said freeware, but that's just desirable. I don't mind paying (once, and a reasonable amount) for useful software.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 09:54:20 am
content: Companies selling backup software have moved away from doing a file by file copy for various reasons. You seem to want to do it the hard way without dealing with the drawbacks that were solved by changing the method. You best chance is probably doing a simple Robocopy, but you'll need to verify the integrity of what you copied yourself.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 10:13:10 am
content: Quote from: Mr. Scram on October 30, 2018, 09:54:20 amBecause the resulting universally accessible copy doesn't lock you into their product?My rule now is, if I can't walk away from a smoking pile of ashes with JUST the backup drive in my hand, and still directly access my entire fileset on any PC with no special software installed, then it's not good enough.QuoteMy opinion is that MS deliberately made explorer unable to do bulk copies reliably, to create a market for products that could do it. That's the standard corporate methodology, and is all through MS products.And that's why you think of it as 'the hard way'. It shouldn't be. Making a plain, reliable copy of a standard (but large) filesystem - it SHOULD be the simple way to do it. But it isn't, thanks to MS shitty crippleware OS.QuoteOh yeah, I forgot to list 'check copy integrity' in the wants. Also GUI-driven, hence not liking robocopy much either.

author: Messtechniker
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 10:21:57 am
content: Maybe freeware "qtdsync" will meet most of your needs:http://qtdtools.doering-thomas.de/page.php?tool=0&sub=0&lang=enIt is a GUI which basically relies on the rsync protocol.Although it is described as being beta it has been working without any probson a daily basis for over one year now.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 10:40:26 am
content: The proprietary image formats that disk backup utilities use can have certain benefits sometimes.For example doing regular backups like this allows for use of incremental images. Instead of copying over the entire disk every time the tool just finds the files that have changed and packs them up into incremental images of the master image. As a result these incremental images are tiny and so make it practical to have backups run as often as every single day(But every week is probably more reasonable) while retaining all the history for each run. Every so often it will create a new master image but even those are smaller than usual as the contents are compressed.In order to recover the backup you simply also include a copy of the software that created the backup image on every drive. The software is usually not very big anyway and pretty sure at least one drive will still hold a non corrupted copy of the software itself. If later on once you have Windows 14 or 2032 or One or whatever they will call it and the software doesn't work anymore you can still spin up a Windows 7 instance in a VM and use it to extract the backup image.Given that you have backup drives that are the same size as your work drive you could just do sector by sector clone onto the backup drive using the many many drive cloning utilities out there. That's the only way to grantee absolutely all the weird OS specific hidden metadata in the filesystem gets carried over.

author: MrMobodies
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 10:46:17 am
content: I personally for use backups:Ghost 11.5 (Windows and dos)Macrium Reflect commercialClonezillaRobocopy with Shadowspawn (to copy locked files) in profiles and profile data.What I do, I move all the work out, get it setup how I want to the size as small as I can get it and make a disc image.I make a script to use Robocopy with Shadowspawn to copy the profiles across and make it run at certain times on task scheduler or just leave them the shortcut to run the script whenever they want with external USB drives.I set switches it doesn't copy junctions across and keeps the security permissions the same and so on.On disc failure all I have to do is extract the disk image to a new drive and copy the profiles back from when it last worked and it will be like nothing happened.For others they can log in as administrator and run a batch file to copy the new things back to their profiles.That doesn't take long at all and no messing about.I just looked at that qtdsync and I'll take a good look at that later.For basic synchronising across file servers years ago I have found this tool which I found worked reliably:DSynchronize (It is further down the page.)http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/It is small and not based on Java where it would gradually take up huge amounts memory and eventually stop like the others.I would make startup scripts on checking for new or altered files on the others before it starts up and I had no problems with it.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 10:48:46 am
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on October 30, 2018, 10:13:10 amI'm just saying you seem to paint yourself into a corner by setting all kinds of requirements. Would and should and stances on company policies don't matter when you lose your files. Something that works reliably does.

author: alsetalokin4017
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 11:26:20 am
content: Clonezilla, followed by gparted.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 11:53:08 am
content: For migrating a harddrive to a new one Clonezilla is excellent. If you want to make regular backups to have an exact copy (which is accessible from an OS) on a different system then rsync is the tool to use. Any decent NAS unit supports rsync.

author: sokoloff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 12:08:36 pm
content: OP states they want is a drive imaging tool, not a file copying tool.rsync (and tools built atop it) runs on the filesystem level, copying files and file metadata.While that's very useful in daily operations (and I rely on it as well), it's not a good match for "I want a perfect image of my drive" but rather for "I want a copy of all of my files".For drive imaging, I use "dd", readily available on any boot-from-USB Linux distro. Find any "live CD" or "live USB" distro, boot from that, and dd away. I tend to dd from a drive to a disk image file that I can then treat like any other file (copy it, back it up, etc). Later, if you want to rehydrate it onto a drive, use dd again.Only for his very last point (#4) would I recommend a scripted rsync as a means of regular, hands-off backup.

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 12:21:37 pm
content: I gave up on making disk images/full disk backups a long time ago. Life is too short for that kind of hassle. I can reinstall a basic functioning Windows in 15 minutes if necessary. For my personal data, stuff that is unique to and/or created by me, I just keep multiple copies. It totals less than 10 GB and I have enough copies that if one or two go bad it won't be an issue. For everything else, movies, music, TV shows, etc., I have a FreeNAS machine I assembled a few years back. It has four drives (two mirrored pairs) 4 GB each which should be enough for quite a while. I use FreeFileSync to keep everything in sync.

author: Rerouter
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 12:38:33 pm
content: I'm a fan of driveimageXML, I've had to recover from its archives a few times, and my general tool to rip a hard drive using Raw mode if I need a 1:1 copy,

author: technix
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 12:45:52 pm
content: Two things choking me up is Windows XP and the fact that this is not a UNIX based setup.Most UNIXes can be backed up almost perfectly using a file-by-file approach: you can make a tarball out of the root filesystem of an installed system, copy it over to somewhere else, expand it into a drive, and have the system up and running again after a quick touch-up in /etc/fstab and reinstall of the bootloader (GRUB for Linux, Clover for Hackintosh, no bootloader needed for macOS on real Macs.)If you drop Windows XP requirement, the built-in backup tool for Windows 7 actually works reasonably well, and is supported even in Windows 10.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 02:14:05 pm
content: Quote from: sokoloff on October 30, 2018, 12:08:36 pmWhat? No, I have drive imaging tools, and didn't use them for so long I can't even recall the names.Because:- Random collection of drives, mostly all different.- I try to keep the backup drives much bigger than current backup data size. So I can put a copy of an entire entire drive tree, in a dated folder on the backup. And do this multiple times.- I got sick of drive imaging tools regularly going obsolete due to ever rising hard disk capacity.QuoteI can never find the sweet spot between too pedantically detailed, longwinded and explicit, vs brief and vague in my posts. You seem to have read the opposite of what I meant to say.QuoteOh well, my reasons for not switching to Linux, and for still using XP, are fairly complex. Neither relevant here, or probably what you'd expect.QuoteI started the thread/question, because it would SEEM to be such a universal, basic need - being able to make reliable copies of large filesystems under Windows. Kicked off via a standard GUI two-window folders view, just like most FTP utilities. COPY THIS selected set of files/folders (maybe even a drive root) TO this other place (typically a new empty folder on a backup drive.)Much the same as if you were just using MS Explorer - except with Explorer it won't work for large transfers. It will typically _start_ to work, then it will fail and you can't resume.Quote from: rdl on October 30, 2018, 12:21:37 pmYes, I don't backup Windows system installs either. And also can install Windows fairly quickly. But the set of utils takes longer. There's no point making drive backups of this stuff because the usual failure case means 'start with a new PC', and system backups are never portable to new systems. Thank you registry.QuoteWell you are lucky, or young. My 'work' drive content is about 270 GB, a transient offloading drive ia 160GB, and most of my music and videos are on another networked PC. Plus there's also the NAS.Btw, do your mirrored pairs on the NAS, each read as standard drives if you pull them out, and plug into another PC? Try it.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 02:20:52 pm
content: Quote from: rdl on October 30, 2018, 12:21:37 pmThe lack of version control will bite you sooner or later, it seems.

author: sokoloff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 02:48:39 pm
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on October 30, 2018, 02:14:05 pmYou're right and that's my error. You pretty clearly said at one point that you didn't want a drive image and I read it too quickly and concluded exactly the opposite based on my own practices and preferences. My apologies for my mis-reading your text that was perfectly clear upon a more careful reading. You did well on the sweet spot; I just blew it.If you'll permit me a few more words to share why I prefer drive imagesin addition touse cases where I use filesystem copies, it makes it very easy to be sure that I've "gotten everything". It's not susceptible to file permission errors, hidden or system files being excluded, or any number of various errors where "Damn it, I thought I copied everything, but something's missing" or "Maybe something is missing; I can't be totally sure, because I don't trust Windows file copy utilities to actually copy everything and preserve everything [file atime, mtime, ctime, owners, permissions, etc]" These are archived into machine-name-date files that I can stash onto the NAS and backup to S3/glacier as archives and know that I can perfectly rehydrate at any time.When I readQuote from: TerraHertz on October 30, 2018, 09:44:31 amTo me, a plain drive image (the image of the block device)isthe most faithful backup of the current state of things, and is literally what you read as a "plain old hard disk" (as opposed to a "filesystem on a plain old hard disk"). I mis-read your last line as worrying against custom/proprietary formats, not against block device bit-for-bit copies that anything can read just as well as a hard drive itself.Your text was clear enough; I still misread it. That happens. Sorry for the misread.

author: alpher
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 03:10:46 pm
content: I'm using ;https://freefilesync.org/

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 04:48:36 pm
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on October 30, 2018, 02:14:05 pmExplorer is notoriously bad indeed. The file managing tool 'total commander' (which is the Windows version of the DOS based tool Norton Commander) probably is a better choice. Total commander does have a two window folders view.

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 07:47:56 pm
content: I have over 50 items in my Portable folder. Not all are truly "portable" because some still write to the registry, but they run without problems when I reinstall Windows. Games are worse though. Seems like the majority of games in recent years need their own special version of msvc++ in order to run, and some require specific windowspatchesupdates also.As far as version control, I don't really have anything that needs it, date and/or file size is usually enough. I know that's not the case for everyone though.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 07:54:01 pm
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on October 30, 2018, 02:14:05 pmTrying to read a hard drive used in PC A in PC B may not work anyway if the BIOS uses a different sector translation method. I don't know how much of a problem this still is with really modern PCs but in my experience pulling a hard drive from one PC and using it in another often doesn't work.The bottom line is: keep a hard drive and the system it is on together.

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 09:28:41 pm
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on October 30, 2018, 02:14:05 pmI actually don't know. They use ZFS. I know they can't be read by a Windows machine. I don't think Linux can either. It's just not something I wanted to worry about. The mirrored pairs are duplicates of each other. If a disk goes out I should be able to just replace it and rebuild the mirror. If for some reason that fails I can just make a whole new copy. I also have most of the files on my old WHS machine, which the FreeNAS replaced.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 11:28:26 pm
content: Yes with old hard drives the motherboard was important because they used cylinder/track/head addressing so the hard drive controller could decide how to spread the data. All reasonably modern drives (for example >50GB or anything with SATA) have moved to using LBA addressing where the drive itself manages where to put things and the motherboard just simply sees sectors numbered from 0 to however many there are. These drives will read just fine in any PC. Same goes for the fancy new PCIe NVME SSD drives (Tho older motherboard get confused by them in BIOS so the OS better bring its own drivers).As for FreeNAS drives you can certainly plug it into any linux machine and read it just like any other drive. That is as long as you have not used any sort of fancy RAID functionality in it or used encryption, getting data off a RAID array is a huge nightmare. I use UnRAID as my NAS server that does RAID redundancy in a special way where every drive in the array still maintains a normal linux filesystem and can be read normally by any linux machine. This provides double pairity raid functionality but still lets you pull data off the drives directly if too many drives die so the array can't rebuild (Obviously you still loose data on the dead drives). I feel safer not trusting RAID to do its job.

author: sokoloff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 11:37:15 pm
content: Quote from: Berni on October 30, 2018, 11:28:26 pmFreeNAS runs on the zfs filesystem.zfs has a license conflict with Linux that put it into an ambiguous legal status, which means few (no?) Linux distros used to enable zfs by default. About 2 years ago, some in depth legal review concluded that the zfs kernel binary did not infringe on the GPL and some linux distros began to ship with zfs enabled. ("Any linux machine" is almost surely an overestimation.)You can, of course, take a FreeNAS drive and put it into aFreeBSDsystem and read the data. (FreeNAS is just a packaged "appliance" running on FreeBSD (just barely) under the covers.)

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 11:47:22 pm
content: I use a mix of strategies so as to minimize the risk of losing anything even in case of bad luck.* Partition-wide full or incremental backups (includes OS and data partitions): currently using Acronis TrueImage on my Windows machines, and clonezilla on my Linux ones. Approx. once a month and on alternate media: on an home-built NAS(RAID5) and on separate removable HDDs (simple NTFS or ext4) that are stored in different rooms.* Frequent data backup (file copy) either via freefilesync or rsync depending on the machine. Same as above, alternatively stored on the NAS and on separate HDDs.* I also use Mercurial as my main source control tool. I regularly push my local repositories to several media as well.* I use practically no "online" storage for my backups for various reasons (trust, privacy, confidentiality, etc).All my existing storage media (HDDs and SSDs) are changed approx every 2 to 3 years max.As with life in general, I personally believe that the key to data perennity is reproduction.

author: alank2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 12:32:10 am
content: Macrium free is well, free. Backup machines to an external drive or to a network share and then offsite it from there.

author: drussell
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 12:39:59 am
content: dddd current drive onto new drive, expand partition if you wish using something like gparted.

author: BradC
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 02:08:13 am
content: Quote from: drussell on October 31, 2018, 12:39:59 amAnd ntfsclone if you are using an NTFS filesystem. You can use ntfsclone piped through a compression process to store a compressed filesystem image that only stores the used areas. It makes making ntfs images much neater, quicker and smaller.When I have to backup or clone a windows box I'll take a backup of the mbr/part table (dd) and then each partition (ntfsclone). When restoring onto a new drive => the original size, just restore it as it was and use gparted to expand/move things to use any extra space if available. So much so that when I set up a new machine for someone these days, I'll often put a directory on the machine with a backup of the ptable/mbr and a compressed ntfsclone image of the filesystem. That way when they inevitably trash the machine with a trojan, virus or rootkit, we can copy the backup off, restore to clean without having to re-install from scratch and they can then copy their backup data back on. Much quicker, and with the size of drives these days it's hardly an imposition.As for backups, all my machines get backed up using rsync differential backups on a 60 day rotating schedule. First backup of each month gets shunted off-site. Linux and OSX boxes are easy, just rsync over ssh. Windows boxes/VMs use an administrative share on the box to mount the filesystem and then rsync that, along with a vaguely recent drive image.It works so well that when I recently replaced the drives in my desktop, I just put the new drives in, booted from a sysresccd and rsynced the previous nights backups onto the new disks and re-installed the bootloader. I did encounter some permissions issues with suid files that identified a flaw in my procedure, but nothing that wasn't fixed pretty sharpish.

author: thermistor-guy
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 02:35:04 am
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on October 30, 2018, 09:44:31 amHaven't tried it myself on Win7, but I've had good experience with Argentum backup software on WinXP:https://www.argentuma.com/backup.htmlEasy to use, current price is USD 39. You can download a trial version and check it out.

author: rhb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 03:03:46 am
content: I'd like to suggest something like the Syba USB dual drive docking station I bought for about $18 from Newegg.Aside from letting you access a pair of bare drives over USB, it will copy one drive to another in standalone mode.I had a drive fail such that the system would not boot. But I was able to copy the drive using it and recover all the user files. It's just a standalone raw Unix dd(1) copy, so the target drive needs to be larger than the source. But at this point, I can't imagine not having something like that.I don't generally do systems work for other people, so I've not extensively used it. But I'm very happy with it.

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 04:02:49 am
content: Parted recover CD or boot to Knoppix or some other distribution that contains it and run it from there. Knoppix is an all in one Linux distro that does a lot of stuff, very useful for recovery or whole disk backup, especially the DVD version.Note that to properly copy a disk or partition on any OS it needs to be unmounted.

author: MrMobodies
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 04:48:05 am
content: Quote from: cdev on October 31, 2018, 04:02:49 amI use knoppix occasionally and quite handy but there was one problem with the release I was using. When I low level formatted a drive using one of the tools to clear everything it failed and long story short it set the secure password on the drive.I was furious. Fortunately after searching I found a Western Digital document with known passwords to reset some of its drives and one of them worked on that model.

author: lwatts666
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 04:59:28 am
content: I've been using disk2vhd (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhdto create a Virtual Hard Disk image file from one or more physical disk partitions on my work laptop.Its fairly fast, and even circumvents end-point encryption on the laptop disk.The resulting VHD file can be easily mounted on a windows or Linux box and appears just like any other drive. Very easy to recover files.

author: johnh
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 05:59:02 am
content: to synch folder between my pc and external hard drive. I use "Create Synchronicity".You can have different profiles left to right mirror, left to right incremental and two way incremental.exclude or iclude file typespreviewand logging

author: celestialcrystal
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: November 02, 2018, 10:15:04 am
content: AOMEI Backupper will be my preference. It can work with Windwos 10/8/7, XP and Vista. It can be used to copy disk or make a backup:https://www.backup-utility.com/help/

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 04, 2018, 05:04:46 am
content: Thanks for all the great tips and links. I stopped replying for a while because on 20181101 I had another priority interrupt, of the 'windfall too good to refuse' kind.Anoherbunch of vintage computing gear, needing evaluation and storage. Related urgent chores still onging. Among which I now have a PDP-8/S! Wheeeee!So of course since I mentioned being about to make a backup, but didn't yet do it, probably now will be when my main HDD fails. Touch wood.

author: blargg
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: November 04, 2018, 08:56:29 am
content: Three paritions (running Ubuntu): root, home, and big (media, other large files). Files are organized so multiple overlapping strategies can be used:ddto do byte-level mirror of root and home partitions, so backup drive is immediately bootable, and there's no question of reliability of backup.rsyncto mirror big partition. Only copies new/modified files.gzipto make compressed byte-level mirrors of root and home partitions so I can have some previous versions with dead-simple restoration (cat /dev/zero >fill; sync; rm fillbeforehand to clear unused blocks and thus reduce gzipped file size). Good if some "upgrade" screws things up, or other situation where I need a complete roll-back.duplicityto make incremental backups of projects/source code, where having old versions from way back might be important. Restricted to just projects so it won't be huge with system files etc.Backup drive isn't left connected to mains or computer, so any electrical events won't kill the drive.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 05, 2018, 06:54:04 am
content: This "duplicity" sounds neat. I want my backups to retain some history to them. Tho im running windows everywhere so il likely rather go find a windows alternative rather than trying to get it running in cygwin.I built a nice NAS but still haven't got around to setting proper backups. Ideally i would want to have it incrementally backup my whole OS drive so that i have a few options to revert back to if things go wrong.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 05, 2018, 07:08:34 am
content: Quote from: Berni on November 05, 2018, 06:54:04 amYou may want to look into Shadow Copies.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy#Windows_8_and_Server_2012

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 05, 2018, 07:36:19 am
content: Quote from: Mr. Scram on November 05, 2018, 07:08:34 amI did play around with it inside a VM running Win7 and it was pretty neat.Then i recreated a disaster event by nuking the OS drive and attempting to recover from it. The windows installation disc can be used to read the backup file and restore it so that's pretty neat, except that the restore operation kept failing with some errors. I couldn't figure out what was wrong. It could be the fault of the VM (It was KVM on linux) or the Windows ISO (It was not a stock image because it included updates and extra drivers to make it work on modern machines as this was on Intel KabbyLake with NVME storage, Yes stock original release Win7 has already has issues on machines this new). It seamed like full bootable images are a different format of backup that need to be restored by booting into the installation CD. So i decided as awesome as it works for files its not a good choice for the OS drive because i can already see myself cursing in an actual disaster scenario where i get the same restore problem occur.So yeah this is pretty similar to the concern of the original thread topic. So far plan is to go with one of the many third party windows disk backup utilities, but haven't decided on a particular one, it would be nice if the resulting image file was otherwise readable. Such as the master image that the increments base on being a raw BIN file that i could worse case simply use WinHex to write it byte by byte directly to a drive and have clone (That is a few weeks or months old because its missing the incremental images, but at least i have a booting drive).

author: CJay
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 05, 2018, 07:59:59 am
content: I confess I use MS tools now but back in the day when I did IT for small businesses, I used robocopy and a short script to back up, catalog, zip and name backups for a Mercury/32 mail server*, last year I had a request for single email out of a couple of million that'd been backed up almost 8 years ago, worked perfectly and the company got their info within a couple of hours.I originally wrote it and used it on Win 2K, for giggles, I fired up the mail server and script on Win 7 (it originally ran on Win 2K) and it still worked just fine, as it had done on 2K and XP.It's fairly simple to use Robocopy if you can define your backup criteria, even simpler if you're using a 'legacy' OS as Richcopy GUI will work on it and you can schedule your jobs..*Mercury/32 stored each email as a single file in a folder per user which is woefully inefficient but incredibly easy to manipulate and work with, my script parsed each email and pulled out To: From: and Subject: to add to a simple flat file database before zipping them up into dated files and shipping them out to a local and remote server, both of which were backed up to tape daily.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 05, 2018, 08:05:16 am
content: Duplicity user here. Don’t go there. Seriously. When your file set gets large then it falls on its arse banging up to 4-6Gb of RAM and your entire CPU trying to resolve what to do. Plus it’s chock full of bugs. I can’t count the number of hours I’ve lost to that turd.I use rdiff-backup at the moment. That’s reliable up to a TiB - 10M files or so.aws cli is also good. It’s nice and easy to just hit “aws s3 sync” and be done.If you’re on windows or something it’s probably worth finding something and just buying it.Edit: I used Mercury/PMail too. Lovely bit of software.

author: rsjsouza
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 07, 2018, 01:33:36 am
content: I think I mentioned this in another post. I use Second Copy, which has the possibility of performing simple copy with CRC verification. I set a daily schedule for the most critical files (e-mail, notes, for example) and a bi-weekly task to update other less important things (databooks, articles, etc.).It struggles a bit with opened files, but if you leave it alone ittends to solve itself.I would love to script Teracopy to do this, but I couldn't yet find time to investigate (I trust its verification better than Second Copy)I heard that Aomei phones home way too much to my comfort. Otherwise it is a good software.