Windows backup

[XOIIO]

Windows 10 backup works a lot better, I think the default save state is a few hours so you won't lose much.
It won't backup the OS or program files so uses less space.

That's one problem I had with it, no ability to do a complete backup.

[ElektroQuark]

I installed Win 10 over Win 7 and the Win 7 backup utility remains accessible: I can do a full backup of the system drive. Is it missing in "plain" Win 10?

[Jeff_Birt]

You can create a system image in Windows 10. It is in an odd place though, not in the same place as the file history backup which is confusing.

[rdl]

I think I'm gonna call it.

The USB HDD backup works fine, but the flash drive plugged into the same port is a no go. I tried with the backup I made directly to it by network sharing and I tried copying the other backup from the USB HDD. Neither worked. The flash drive is there though, it even gets a drive letter assigned. I can see it using diskpart. Apparently "System Repair" is specifically programmed to ignore flash drives, or maybe I'm missing something.

Another problem is that the flash drive is too slow. It took around 30 minutes to copy over the 11 GB .vhd file. On the other hand, installing from the flash drive would just be reads, so it should be considerably faster. Except I can't get it to work so that's all academic. Even if DVD is faster, I don't want a DVD drive in that computer. As a matter of fact, I don't really want a DVD drive in any computer.

I'm going to switch to SSD for this.

Small ones are pretty cheap but still very fast, and the free Windows Backup should work fine with it. Besides that, the computer where I most often need to reinstall Windows has a 2x 2.5" Icy Dock bay, which will be perfect for this. I think what I'll do next is try to combine a backup with the "System Repair" on the same (bootable) SSD.

[XOIIO]

I think I'm gonna call it.

The USB HDD backup works fine, but the flash drive plugged into the same port is a no go. I tried with the backup I made directly to it by network sharing and I tried copying the other backup from the USB HDD. Neither worked. The flash drive is there though, it even gets a drive letter assigned. I can see it using diskpart. Apparently "System Repair" is specifically programmed to ignore flash drives, or maybe I'm missing something.

Another problem is that the flash drive is too slow. It took around 30 minutes to copy over the 11 GB .vhd file. On the other hand, installing from the flash drive would just be reads, so it should be considerably faster. Except I can't get it to work so that's all academic. Even if DVD is faster, I don't want a DVD drive in that computer. As a matter of fact, I don't really want a DVD drive in any computer.

I'm going to switch to SSD for this.

Small ones are pretty cheap but still very fast, and the free Windows Backup should work fine with it. Besides that, the computer where I most often need to reinstall Windows has a 2x 2.5" Icy Dock bay, which will be perfect for this. I think what I'll do next is try to combine a backup with the "System Repair" on the same (bootable) SSD.

Sounds like you have a usb 2.0 flash drive, definitely a no no for backups unless you have a lot of time.

And yeah ssd price is coming down nicely, I got a 120gb crucial one for only $60 that I tossed in an external hard drive enclosure for my tech tools. Annoyingly a couple months later there were some 240gb ones for $80 but I was broke again  by then.

[rdl]

To be fair, this discussion started because of my attempt to use a Windows feature to perform what any reasonable person would assume to be its primary function and describing how it basically didn't work. More than once.

I haven't given up on it though. I'm pretty sure if used in the very specific and limited manner in which Microsoft intended, but unfortunately never made clear, Windows Backup will actually work.

[timb]

Another great way to backup Windows is to run Windows in virtual machines and simply copy the VMs to your backup drive 

That's how I run Windows!

Actually, it works quite well to be honest. I've got an external 200GB SSD in a tiny little Thunderbolt enclosure. What I did was create a 200GB .sparsebundle disk image stored on the root of that SSD. I've got my system setup to hide the drive (but still mount it); then, on boot (or when the drive is plugged in) the DMG that resides on the drive is mounted and shown.

Why go through the trouble, you may ask? It makes backing the drive up super easy and fast! Essentially, a .sparsebundle is a special type of macOS Disk Image; instead of being one huge file, it's actually multiple 8MB files that look like a single file. As you add data to the image, it grows. The best part is, because it's split into 8MB chunks, I can use rsync to back it up to my NAS over the network very quickly.

You see, normally VMWare creates a large, single file for the VM's virtual drive (25GB in the case of my XP VM). If I boot that VM and, say, change a single 4KB text file, then the next time I ran a backup, rsync would have to copy the entire 25GB virtual drive file. However, because I store my VM's in the aforementioned .sparsebundle disk image, that 25GB is split over a number of 8MB chunks. Now rsync only has to copy a few 8MB files!

People rag on Apple, but they sure do make backing up a breeze. Time Machine has saved my ass several times over the last 8 years. The built-in Disk Utility.app also makes creating bootable disk images of your entire drive (or just a folder) very easy. (You can even restore said images to a smaller drive; Time Machine can do that too. Finally, you can always use dd or rsync from the command line to backup and restore drives.)

[setq]

People rag on Apple, but they sure do make backing up a breeze. Time Machine has saved my ass several times over the last 8 years. The built-in Disk Utility.app also makes creating bootable disk images of your entire drive (or just a folder) very easy. (You can even restore said images to a smaller drive; Time Machine can do that too. Finally, you can always use dd or rsync from the command line to backup and restore drives.)

They make it look easy but HFS+ is just boiled shit. My MacOS love was killed by incremental corruption of a time machine backup and a failed time machine appliance on separate occasions. Journaling doesn't even work on the filesystem. That took a month to piece together afterwards.

[ElektroQuark]

Quote from: Jeff_Birt on Yesterday at 11:31:32

You can create a system image in Windows 10. It is in an odd place though, not in the same place as the file history backup which is confusing.

Can you give me a clue to find it? Thanks.

[Jeroen3]

You can use the "Windows 7 backup" in Windows 10.

[Jeff_Birt]

Quote from: Jeff_Birt on Yesterday at 11:31:32

You can create a system image in Windows 10. It is in an odd place though, not in the same place as the file history backup which is confusing.

Can you give me a clue to find it? Thanks.

1- Right-click on the Start button and open Control Panel

2- Click File History

3- In File History, click the System Image Backup link in the bottom-left corner of the screen

It is hidden in the lower left, in small text, very hard to notice...

[ElektroQuark]

Indeed it's hidden. Why did MS do that? User friendly...

[Jeff_Birt]

To me it looks like a bunch of bits and pieces they were working on just got thrown in there. I think they have all the bits to do a nice job (underlying code) but it is hard to find and hard to set up to do anything reasonable. For example, if it can make a backup image, why can't it automatically do an incremental one?

The automatic backup in WHS2011 worked awesome.

[ElektroQuark]

I just tried that backup utility and it leads me to:

Control Panel\System and Security\Backup and Restore (Windows 7)

So it runs the Win 7 backup utility.

[rdl]

I was able to get the "System Repair" files onto an SSD and successfully boot to the System Recovery Options screen. I had copied the existing (tested/working) WindowsImageBackup folder from the DVD onto the SSD also.
When I select "Restore your computer using a system image." It doesn't find it.

But it's right there. On the same drive it's running from. Just...wow.
 

I give up I guess. I'll just settle for having the backups on some other drive. I just hope I can get the Repair/Recovery thing to boot from a flash drive. I really don't want to have to use a DVD drive. It sure would have been nice if the SSD had worked though. It booted to the recovery screen almost instantly. I probably could have had Windows restored, up and running exactly the way I like it in less than a minute. Sigh.

[nanofrog]

I give up I guess. I'll just settle for having the backups on some other drive. ... It sure would have been nice if the SSD had worked though. It booted to the recovery screen almost instantly. I probably could have had Windows restored, up and running exactly the way I like it in less than a minute. Sigh.

FWIW, I've set my boot/OS + applications drive to my SSD, while the OS backups are to a mechanical HDD (I've the files to build a hackintosh on my hardware, but haven't ever tried it). Actual data is stored on a RAID (level 6 via an Areca ARC-1231ML), which is backed up to an external enclosure via eSATA set up as a SPAN.

Works under Windows and Linux IME (each OS has it's own volume via the same drives; I use Acronis to do all of this, which doesn't care about the OS using the user creatable boot disk).

[timb]

People rag on Apple, but they sure do make backing up a breeze. Time Machine has saved my ass several times over the last 8 years. The built-in Disk Utility.app also makes creating bootable disk images of your entire drive (or just a folder) very easy. (You can even restore said images to a smaller drive; Time Machine can do that too. Finally, you can always use dd or rsync from the command line to backup and restore drives.)

They make it look easy but HFS+ is just boiled shit. My MacOS love was killed by incremental corruption of a time machine backup and a failed time machine appliance on separate occasions. Journaling doesn't even work on the filesystem. That took a month to piece together afterwards.

The introduction of CoreStorage with Mountain Lion gave HFS+ a nice facelift and was a good stopgap measure. Ideally it would have only lasted a few years and we'd have been on ZFS by now. Unfortunately, due to concerns over the future of Sun, that didn't happen.

The good news is that macOS Sierra includes a DP of Apple's new APFS, which will be replacing "HFS+ w/ Journaling" next year (across *all* Apple devices I might add, from the Watch to the iPhone to the ATV to the Mac). I've been playing with APFS and it's *very* stable already, so I'm really excited to see what they do with it over the next 12 months.

It includes snapshots as well, which should fundamentally change the way Time Machine works and make it much faster, too.

That all said, I've been running OS X exclusively as my primary OS since 2003 (and using it since 2001) and I've never lost any data or had a single crash due to file system problems. Keep in mind, that includes my parents, who I've had on Macs since 2006, plus a small business that I did contract IT management for which ran on Macs (around 50 of them, circa 2008).

I've never had a Time Machine backup fail to restore in all that time, either. (Though, I have had some Time Capsules fail; specifically the first generation units were notoriously prone to failure due to a combination of those 1TB drives (which had just come out) being unreliable and running too hot.)

I generally recommend to anyone who uses a Time Capsule to get an external drive and run a full Time Machine backup to it each month (or at least make a Disk Image of their Home Folder and save it on the drive). Though, that advice is a bit redundant now that macOS Sierra offers the option of syncing (most of) ~/ to iCloud.

For me personally, I use a Time Capsule because it's super convenient. To make sure I've got a somewhat recent backup I've got an (original) Drobo hooked to a SBC in the closet, setup as a file server; once a week it runs a script which uses rsync to copy the latest backup over. It then mounts the DMG (via FUSE) and attempts to checksum a handful of random files. That's a good sanity test to make sure the backup is readable.

Anyway, I've never needed to use a backup from there as the Time Capsule has never failed me.

TL;DR: HFS+ is old, but it's not nearly as bad as *some* people make it out to be, especially since Journaling and CoreStorage came on the scene.

[XOIIO]

FWIW file history in windows 10 is pretty nice especially if you have network storage like me, granted my network storage is in the form of a server rack with a couple servers, battery backups, and a couple other things, it's a nice set and forget way to make sure you have your stuff backed up.


Combine that with a manual backup to a different physical drive from time to time and you have a nice chance of your data staying safe, excluding natural disasters.