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AOMEI Backupper FREE + AOMEI Partition Assistant FREE - Mini-Review
IainB:
@dr_andus: Oh well done! That's what I would have done - gone and looked at the Help documentation ... but usually as a last/later resort... :-[
I'm sorry I can't be much help as I don't know much about how AOMEI does its backups, as I have not actually tried that out. I use FreeFileSync for an incremental/differential backup. I don't back up system files though - that's including the C:\Windows and C:\Program Files (2 dirs.) ("generic" proggies).
However, I do back up:
* ...\UTIL, which is my preferred alternative program files directory and which holds most of the specialised and non-generic installed programs that I depend on - that is, basically anything that didn't come already installed on the PC (including most games) and which are mostly installed as "portable" wherever possible, so that they are self-contained installations and can be ported elsewhere and run without much setup fuss.
* ...\Archive, which holds the compressed installers and any necessary installation licence keys for all the \UTIL proggies and a few \Program Files proggies (e.g., the MS Office install ISO file) and for any special drivers I have installed in the system (e.g., the multifunction printer).
* All my several working data ("Workdata") folders grouped on the C: drive.
* Nowadays also the C:\User\... directories as they usually have a lot of important stuff - e.g., including OneDrive, Google Drive, and working data files, and stuff that I have learned to my cost one will likely need to configure/support/run/recover some of the the \UTIL proggies and especially some of the "generic" proggies, when migrating to another PC.
Backup strategy:
Before conducting backups, one needs to have a clear idea about what one needs to back up, and why, and what would be the most appropriate method for one's peculiar needs.
Where you say:
...It took over 7 hrs today to back up my system and then verify the backup, so I'd rather not do a full system backup every time if I don't have to.
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- it would seem that you might not have a clear strategy.
In the old days, I never really had a backup strategy either, and used to back up (originally) to floppy disks as a matter of course. It was very tedious and I didn't do it often enough.
Then my backup strategy was learned by accident from a successful and speedy recovery from a fatal failure of a laptop some years ago, when I was working overseas on an urgent project. I learned the advantage of portability of programs and data.
It was the laptop keyboard processor that had failed, rendering the device unusable. The latest data that I was working on was intact on the hard drive, but not yet on any backup.
So, within a day I had got a new PC, and, after an IT support guy had helpfully suggested it, the old hard drive became a PHD (Portable Hard Drive) - I bought a PHD enclosure, which was relatively new technology at the time. This was used as my new, key backup/recovery feature.
I now consider a PC as just a temporary resting-place for my nomadic computing requirements and periodically update my backups to a portable hard drive reserved for the purpose, I also rely on some Cloud backup, but have that backed-up also. I am thus usually able to recover all my data stores from backups, one way or another. (Paranoia rules.)
Things tend to change, and now that Windows 10 offers some more useful backup functionality - especially the apparently really useful backup and restore functionality of File History - I shall trial it, and maybe, after I have trialled it, it could well end up becoming my new de facto backup/recovery tool to a PHD...
dr_andus:
Thanks for your suggestions, IainB.
In the end it took a lot more, something like 10 hours to create a system image, as the verification afterwards took as long as the creation of the image.
I have a 1TB drive, but with everything together I only have around 250GB data on it to back up (including systems files). This is why I was surprised that it took so long to create it. And while AOMEI was doing it, it was saying it was going through to whole of 913GB, which is the size of the entire C:\ drive.
The resulting image file was 427GB. Again, if all my data is c. 250GB, what's the extra stuff?
As for whether AOMEI can do incremental backup of the system, I have now checked (now that the process has finished) and the answer seems to be yes:
AOMEI Backupper FREE + AOMEI Partition Assistant FREE - Mini-Review
I still wonder though if system incremental backup is safe or good practice.
But clearly, I would prefer to go with an incremental backup next time, as my external hard drive is 1TB, so another full backup might not even fit. And even on a 2TB not all that many full backups would fit.
As for my strategy? It is to do a system backup, as I'm about to install some new drivers on my laptop, and I want to be able to roll back if anything goes wrong.
Maybe what I could have done differently is to keep my application data on a separate physical drive within the laptop or on a partition, so that the C:\ drive only contains the Windows 7 Pro installation.
I think the reason I haven't done that is that in the past I came across some of my older software that was awkward to use when the files it worked with were on another drive. But maybe I'll have to reconsider that.
dr_andus:
Maybe I should have also mentioned that the external USB 2.0 Toshiba hard drive I'm using I bought in July 2009, so it's not exactly the latest tech (and for most of its life it sat on a shelf, unplugged)... It might account for some of the slowness.
Shades:
If the device is from 2009, chances are that your USB hard disk is of the USB 2.0 kind. Although theoretical speeds of USB 2.0 are higher, in practice you are happy if such a device can sustain a read/write throughput of 20MByte/sec. If the rest of your computer is from around the same period, chances are that your internal hard disk(s) is/are connected to SATA 2 port(s). 4 to 5 years ago the successor of SATA2 came out, which doubled the speed of SATA2. Around that same time USB 3.0 also came out.
A SATA3 internal hard disk in combination with an USB 3.0 device connected on a USB 3.0 port will cut the time it takes to create your backup significantly.
Personally, I think it is better to think of those portable/external USB hard disks as a convenient way to create a backup. Not fast or professional, but very convenient. And if you start the backup just before you go to sleep, after a night's rest the backup is done, so no harm no foul.
For the bulky size of the full backup: Does it contain Windows restore points? Windows has a knack of not adding certain parts of its bulk, to keep the total byte count a lot lower than the actual amount of bytes stored on the hard disk (for example: the folder 'System Volume Information' on each and every partition of your hard disk collects a lot of 'cruft' over time). A tool such AOMEI doing a full backup won't skip such folders.
Incremental backups have the big advantage of being small almost all the time. And as a result, those won't take up much of your time. The disadvantage is that restoring data from such backups can take a long time...and if you have used unreliable media somewhere in the 'chain' of backups, restoring data can become a major headache very quickly.
While the option 'verify' makes you think that your data is backed up safely, if you don't actually test your backups (both incremental and full) the only thing you did was losing time by writing a pile of verified useless garbage. Don't find out you are (royally) screwed the moment a failure occurred and you need to restore your backup. Test your backups when your computer is in working condition first, because you can easily create a new backup if the previous one fails to restore.
Decide for yourself what would be an acceptable period of losing data. As your priorities are likely very different from mine, I wouldn't presume to know how long such a period can be for you. Besides, each different type of data can have a different period. But that is for you to examine and decide.
Anyway, during that period you could make incremental backups and do a full backup once you hit the full extent of such a period. Creating backups using this guideline will be more than adequate for home/small business use.
But whatever backup schema you'll end up using, always test your backups!
dr_andus:
Shades - thanks very much for the detailed answers! :Thmbsup:
If the device is from 2009, chances are that your USB hard disk is of the USB 2.0 kind. Although theoretical speeds of USB 2.0 are higher, in practice you are happy if such a device can sustain a read/write throughput of 20MByte/sec. If the rest of your computer is from around the same period, chances are that your internal hard disk(s) is/are connected to SATA 2 port(s). 4 to 5 years ago the successor of SATA2 came out, which doubled the speed of SATA2. Around that same time USB 3.0 also came out.
A SATA3 internal hard disk in combination with an USB 3.0 device connected on a USB 3.0 port will cut the time it takes to create your backup significantly.-Shades (May 03, 2016, 07:35 AM)
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OK, maybe it's time to get me a new USB 3.0 external hard drive then. It's a relatively new laptop (says "SCSI Disk Device), it does come with a USB 3.0 outlet as well.
For the bulky size of the full backup: Does it contain Windows restore points? Windows has a knack of not adding certain parts of its bulk, to keep the total byte count a lot lower than the actual amount of bytes stored on the hard disk (for example: the folder 'System Volume Information' on each and every partition of your hard disk collects a lot of 'cruft' over time). A tool such AOMEI doing a full backup won't skip such folders.
-Shades (May 03, 2016, 07:35 AM)
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I see. For some reason Windows Restore thing was off (I can't remember why I turned it off, maybe someone recommended me to do that), and I was reminded by HP Support Assistant just a few days ago to turn it back on, which I did.
Incremental backups have the big advantage of being small almost all the time. And as a result, those won't take up much of your time. The disadvantage is that restoring data from such backups can take a long time...and if you have used unreliable media somewhere in the 'chain' of backups, restoring data can become a major headache very quickly.-Shades (May 03, 2016, 07:35 AM)
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I see. So maybe I'm better off getting a new USB 3.0 external hard drive with larger capacity (2 or 3TB?), and then have some full backups occasionally as well.
While the option 'verify' makes you think that your data is backed up safely, if you don't actually test your backups (both incremental and full) the only thing you did was losing time by writing a pile of verified useless garbage. Don't find out you are (royally) screwed the moment a failure occurred and you need to restore your backup. Test your backups when your computer is in working condition first, because you can easily create a new backup if the previous one fails to restore.-Shades (May 03, 2016, 07:35 AM)
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Sorry, what do you mean by "actually testing"? How do do that without messing up the existing installation?
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