Best back-up and disc imaging software

[stuart]

I recently decided to get some new back up software to replace my old, and out of day package I used...

Having read many good reports and recommendations i went for Macrium Reflect.... Macrium Software | Your image is everything (https://www.macrium.com)

it is excellent, very easy to use and set up and east to restore either full images or files...

I have it set to run a FULL disc image every month, and then daily backups, these are automatically merged or deleted.. all i need to do is lug my external drive in and it does the rest at pre-set times... excellent and as it is pre-set times make me back up more...

What I like is it backs up a FULL and COMPLETE image of all your hard drive, including the "hidden" partitions, you then create a USB rescue disc which if disaster struck you boot from using the WINPE software which is a cut down version of Windows, and includes a version of the Macrium Reflect software... once you boot up you can restore the full hard disc, or a certain partition, or even move to a new hard drive :)

Very fast and easy should disaster strike...

I went for the full paid version of the software, but if you just want basic imaging you can get a free. unsupported version... Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free (https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree) it also shows you the differences in versions...

I recommend it and at less than £50 makes it easy to recover if needed :) plus with the paid version the support is excellent via email or there forum although the online documentation is excellent..

Stuart

[technodevotee]

I hope you don't mind me doing a bit of necroposting here Stuart.

I trialled all sorts of backup software when my discs got too big to do Windows image backups and ended up going for the free version of an enterprise product called Veeam Agent for Windows on all my PCs.

It works in a similar way to Macrium and offers almost the same feature set. However, it keeps a constant track of changed files using a SQL database to speed up the processing come backup time. It also offers a feature called forever forward backups where it makes one full backup and from then on only ever does incremental backups on a daily basis. Once the incremental backup completes, it rolls any changes from the oldest backup into the full backup and deletes the oldest one. All of these features including retention time is user configurable of course.

I keep a 4TB USB drive plugged in for the daily backups (shared on the network so that all my PCs can write to it) and do additional Monthly ad-hoc backups to other USB drives, which live in my safe.