Windows 7 C-drive Backup/Clone

[jpanhalt]

Perhaps this belongs in vintage computing.

My desktop PC is a DIY based on components bought from MicroCenter in Cleveland, OH circa 2015.  Its hard drives are all Samsung SSD of different ages.  A 500GB RAID1 drive is partitioned into D and E.  E is empty, and I have a question about deleting that partition, not that I need the space.  It has less than 30 GB on it.  The C-drive is a 256GB and is a little less than half full.  Awhile back I bought a matching SSD for the C-drive and planned to clone it periodically as backup.  My Acronis 2015 True Image 2015 software allows that, but warns about doing it with the system drive, if that drive is mounted.  I recently got a Samsung 500GB external drive with USB3.

My main question pertains to what to do with the System drive:
Would cloning it to the external drive periodically be inadvisable?  My plan would be to do the clone at fairly long intervals (months), as I save very few data files on it and use the internal, as yet unmounted drive, for incremental backups.  The external drive would be saved for recovery in case of a real disaster. eMails are by far the only data on that drive.

A secondary question is about deleting the partition on the RAID 1 drive.  Can I do the following:
Make a backup of the RAID D-drive to a new drive.  Then format the entire RAID drive and eliminate the partition.  Finally restore the empty RAID  drive from the backup.   Is there an easier way?

Regards,
John

[50ShadesOfDirt]

If I followed the drives/config correctly, then:

1. use backup tools with imaging capability, and just image the "C" (ssd?) drive. This is usually better than cloning, especially with 7 y.o. software. modern backup/imaging tools can be free or paid, depending on their features and your choices.

2. backup the "D" and "E" partitions' data, wipe the partitions out (per the rules of your raid software/hardware), reconfigure, and restore the data.

I tend to avoid the complexity of raiding, and just rely on backups (3-2-1 rule) to recover from a failed (ssd) drive ... some unknown raid complexity always reared it's ugly head when I wasn't looking (or hadn't done a backup). Translate this to a possible config of unraid'ing the drives, get them back into shape as single drives, single partitions, and just use one of them as the target for imaging and backups.

[Jeroen3]

Creating a mirror of the entire drive or partition is fine. Be aware that you need to clone both partitions, the small ~100MB bootloader one and the "C" one. Possibly also a recovery one, any other partition is irrelvant unles you want to keep the data.

You can do this with Macrium Reflect, very simple, stable and no-nonse software. Will copy any drive, even mounted, through shadowcopy.
It will also do incrementals/differentials to be done quickly when all you do is change a few files, so no waiting for the full thing to copy over.
My experience with acronis is limited, but I bought a pack of licences back in the day, it was very poor and it's just a carrier to sell you "the new version". I considered it a waste of money and have been using macrium for years.

Whatever you plan to do with raid is unclear. Deleting unused partitions should be trivial in diskmanagement.

By far the biggest risk to a Windows 7 install is malware, raid will not help you in this case, raid is not a backup. Your external disk is.

[jpanhalt]

Thanks for the advice.  For the external drive, I think I will go the clone route as it would be simple to set BIOS to use USB for booting.  Is that correct?

Checked Macrium, and for single user, the price is quite reasonable for a real license ($69.95), not a subscription.  I had "funny" feelings about Acronis from the start and have never seriously used it, except to make a boot disk.  Its constant reminders to use Acronis this or that made me worry that I would be dead in the water if it failed to boot.  On the other hand, a real clone as it seems Macrium provides would be plug and play.   

The partitioned RAID drive is a legacy from my working days when I used 2 computers.  The one for work was never connected to the Internet, except when I needed to register something.  After I retired and hopefully deleted everything confidential on it, I saved the remainder to the E partition.  (The original drive from the work computer was destroyed.)  As time went on, I saved anything useful off that drive onto either my C (system) or D-partition.  The E partition has been empty for quite awhile, so it is just a question of simplifying it.

Everytime I boot up, I worry about my C-drive, so I intend to do these changes soon.  But other opinions are still wanted.

John

[SiliconWizard]

I use Acronis True Image for most of my partition- or disk-level backups on Windows 7.

A full disk image restored to a new drive works fine. Actually my current install of Windows 7 on my main workstation dates back to 2010 and has survived many drives, motherboards and CPU upgrades with just cloning. Never had to reinstall it and the machine that it runs on at the moment has nothing to do with the initial machine it was installed on, apart maybe from the DVD drive.

[jpanhalt]

Thanks.  Using Acronis to clone C might be the quickest solution while I try free Macrium.

[SiliconWizard]

The only thing you might have to do after cloning the OS partition is to re-run the win 7 install and choose 'repair' so it updates the boot parameters (takes only a few seconds). That's usually only required if the drive's interface changed (so the physical drive path would be different), for instance if you clone from a HDD to a SSD.

If you ever clone to a Samsung SSD, Samsung provides a free "Data Migration" tool that works very well too, and automatically changes boot parameters so that the new SSD is immediately bootable. I don't think it supports any other target than a Samsung drive though.

Macrium Reflect should be fine too, haven't used it yet though.

[jpanhalt]

Since it is a new Samsung, I will give that a try.  I wasn't aware of that software -- so much for not reading the manual nowadays.

John

[Jeroen3]

Thanks for the advice.  For the external drive, I think I will go the clone route as it would be simple to set BIOS to use USB for booting.  Is that correct?

No, I don't think it will be that simple. Windows expects a certain storage interface, and usb isn't the right one. Fixing this is possible, but hard.

The best option is to clone to mrimg files, these also support incrementals.
Then you can restore to the same or other disk. Even if not the same size.

[mikeselectricstuff]

I love Macrium reflect - I have it automatically backup my main PC drive to a second drive and a NAS every night, it emails me to let me know it's done. nothing worse than an automatic backup system that fails silently & you don't notice til its too late... 
A really nice feature is you can mount a backup image file as a drive to access files within it.

[jpanhalt]

I tried the Samsung Migration tool last night.  It is probably great, but Win7 wouldn't let it run because a certificate was out of date.  Tried doing it as administrator to no avail.  Also, it apparently doesn't support the T7 (Standalone USB SSD) for cloning.

@Jeroen3

Windows expects a certain storage interface, and usb isn't the right one. Fixing this is possible, but hard.

Windows should boot from a USB, right?  Is that the same issue SiliconWizard referred to here (post#7)?

@SiliconWizard

The only thing you might have to do after cloning the OS partition is to re-run the win 7 install and choose 'repair' so it updates the boot parameters (takes only a few seconds).

[Jeroen3]

The issue I was referring to is windows using the incorrect storage driver (ahci/ide) and not being able to boot at all.
Repair does not fix this. You need to go in and fix the hive manually.

Sometimes people clone and omit or misplace the bootloader partition, then you can use repair.

Anyway, why boot from USB when the ssd in the enclosure also probably has sata. Just use that.

[SiliconWizard]

I tried the Samsung Migration tool last night.  It is probably great, but Win7 wouldn't let it run because a certificate was out of date.  Tried doing it as administrator to no avail.  Also, it apparently doesn't support the T7 (Standalone USB SSD) for cloning.

Dunno why. It works fine on my Win 7 - but I have an older version of their software, and maybe their latest isn't compatible with 7 or something. Or maybe another reason.
Also, it automatically asks for elevated rights when you start it. If it doesn't on your machine, there must be something wrong.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't support USB drives. It's not a tool meant for backups. It's meant to clone to an internal SSD, SATA or NVMe.
Cloning a Windows system on an external USB drive and expecting it to be bootable, I would very much doubt it without having to jump through hoops unfortunately.

As to cloning to a NVMe drive on Win 7, if you don't already have a NVMe drive, you must absolutely install NVMe drivers on your source drive *before* cloning, so that the OS gets cloned with the proper drivers. NVMe is not supported by default in 7 so you need to manually install drivers. Installing them before cloning will be much less hassle than trying to install them using the repair console, which may or may not even work.

But if your goal is to clone to a USB drive and expect to be able to make it bootable, maybe it can be done, but not as easily. I've never tried this myself.

[jpanhalt]

I thought the NVMe name was a bit silly, but that won't keep me from using it. 

I am not superstitious, but having the devices to make backups and not doing that made me wonder how I would feel if I had a failure the next day.  So, I used Acronis True Image to backup the C-drive (system) to the unused partition "E" on the RAID 1 data drive.  Then I made a second backup of the entire data drive (both partitions) to the Samsung T7 USB drive, disconnected it, stored it in a different location.

Now, I feel I can take my time cloning the system drive to a separate, internal SSD drive. Acronis gives a warning about doing that, so I will be exploring Macrium.  Samsung stuff is good quality, but its limitations on the free software and difficulty installing are enough to encourage me to try Macrium.

All of these comments have helped.  I was pretty comfortable messing with 3.1 and became more disconnected with each succeeding generation. For me,  Win 7 is pretty much a black box, which is probably evident from my naive suggestions.

Regards, John
 

[Jeroen3]

I highly doubt hardware that came with windows 7 is able to boot from nvme at all. Regardless of operating system.

[SiliconWizard]

jpanhalt, there's something I think was not well understood here.

You can absolutely use external drives to store images of cloned, bootable partitions or images of entire drives. Images are files, and storing an image of a drive is not *cloning* the drive to an external one. Completely different matter. There is absolutely no problem backing up images with Acronis for instance (but clonezilla does that fine too albeit with not as nice an interface), and being able to later restore them if needed and have the restored drive boot.

You don't need to make your USB backup drive itself bootable. Images can even be restored to a completely different drive than the original, with the proper tools. Acronis can do that.

[jpanhalt]

Yes, I was a little confused.  I did understand the difference between an image and a clone.  The former being compressed and requiring some program to install in a working condition.  The latter is "plug and play." (You may need to change bios settings, though.)

My biggest confusion was over cloning and booting from a cloned USB.  Somewhere in the recesses of my memory I recalled that Win7 could not be booted from a USB -- CD's, floppys, hard drive on the same connection (e.g, SATA) would be OK.  But, I went and searched Google to be sure.  One of the hits was from Intel and several others were from PC "gurus."  Here is the Intel quote:

How to enable USB boot in BIOS Windows 7?

• Restart the system into the BIOS.
• Ensure the Boot Mode is set to EFI (or UEFI). This is found in the Boot Options menu.
• Make sure that the USB Boot Priority is enabled.
• Save the changes and exit.

https://www.intel.com › server-products › server-boards

To add confusion, Acronis warns about cloning the System and leaving that disk attached.  It claims that can cause a conflict on boot.  That part I didn't understand, since the clone should be on a different port/location (e.g., Z) and the boot routine should see C first.  But, I am not one to disagree with a real expert.

A potential problem with leaving a clone attached to SATA and the bootablity from USB are the two things I am most uncertain about.

Background to that concern:
Disconnecting a drive repeatedly is not something I look forward to doing as I have found that while SATA is fine, sometimes the connection is fragile.  That means, I have four Samsung SSD in my PC.  One of the RAID 1 pair is "fragile."  Out of the blue, it failed a few years ago.  I tried it several times and wiggled both plugs,  and it wouldn't be recognized (Intel RAID controller).  It was under warranty, so I sent it to Samsung.  Its service center reported the disk was fine and updated its firmware.  About once a year since, that connection fails.  I wiggle everything and learned that one has to tell the Intel RAID manager to ignore the problem and mark disk as "good."   It is still working about 3 years after that first failure.  Its most recent "pseudo-failure" was a few weeks ago, and I installed a new cable for it.  It was that event that convinced me of my need to seriously address backups or clones. 

[jpanhalt]

Post Backup Changes

This morning I was greeted with a new "homegroup" icon (attached) and Windows took much longer to boot after entering my password.  I assumed it was installing/checking/repairing something.

Where did that come from?  Can it (whatever it is, not just the desktop icon) be removed?  Its appearance appears to be Windows, but the password for that homegroup appears associated with a newer Netgear router I tried during the Summer and returned.  (I've had a Netgear N600 router for ages.  It may not be the fastest, but it has been trouble free.  Last Summer, a lightning strike took it out -- but not the modem that is plugged into the same outlet.  I tried a more more current router, didn't like it and the forced password protection, so I got a new old stock N600.  Windows uninstall was used to remove the newer router software.)

EDIT:  Fixed.  There's a "thewindowsclub.com" article on it.  Did the simple thing first: right click in desktop, click on "refresh" and its gone.  If that's permanent, great. Otherwise, I will dig into the registry as described in the club link.  (https://www.thewindowsclub.com/remove-homegroup-icon-windows-8-desktop )