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by Rafe
Thu Apr 25, 2019 4:06 am
Forum: Technical Tips, Questions & Discussions (Computers & Internet)
Topic: Question Re: Windows 10 System Image Backup
Replies: 8
Views: 6662

Re: Question Re: Windows 10 System Image Backup

I agree with rotor about Acronis. I used it for a while with a Windows 10 Home system and the automatic reboot after a forced Win 10 update not only corrupted that day's backup, but the subsequent incremental backup data became corrupted by the incorrect header data or table data from that first failed backup carrying forward, even the full, non-incremental backups. I learned this the hard way when I had a disk failure over a month later and could only recover partial data from any of the recent Acronis backup runs.

I don't use any external backup aps any longer, though. I have three primary PCs, a workstation and two laptops, and the bootable/OS drives are 2TB on the workstation and and 1TB on the laptops. Have equal-sized USB 3.0 HDs for each, and run a new Windows 10 system image at the beginning of each month. I have a 10TB NAS at the house set as a persistent mapped drive on each PC, and use Windows backup to run automated weekly backups to it. And last I have a couple of 4TB external drives that I use alternately for "semi-manual" backups. That's actually a simple .BAT file on each PC that uses Windows' internal Robocopy to copy all specified data over, separate directory for each PC. Doesn't get the OS or (most) apps, but it runs much faster than simply doing a manual copy via Explorer. So a couple of times a week I snag a data backup from each PC that way. Two is one and one is none. :-) I rely on the system image to build a new hard drive if the OS drive on a machine crashes, but I also keep the standard Windows backup plus the Robocopy backups of the data.

Like Andy said, you'll have a lot of detailed issues to deal with if you use a system image to transfer to a different machine. I had a Dell laptop that was a lemon and they replaced it under warranty with a similar machine, but not exactly the same. So after transfering an image I had to deal with incorrect drivers and stuff, but nowadays tons of software is keyed via unique licenses assigned to a given machine. So not only was the Windows 10 OS license not happy about being moved to a new PC, but I had to deal with everything from Office 365 to Norton to Adobe Creative Cloud and other apps to the populated Windows registry table that wasn't meant for that machine. Took several days to get everything straightened out, and I had to keep going in and out safe mode to get everything resolved.

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