Backup first! A salutary lesson

Thought it worth posting a recent experience and salutary lesson.

Thursday evening I decided to try Hasleo Backup Suite (HBS); I currently use a paid version of Macrium Reflect V.8. My desktop system has 2 SSD drives, 512GB for C: and other system partitions, 2TB for D: data drive.

I ran HBS and created an emergency disk on a USB stick for recovery. Then created and checked a disk partition backup of the C: drive and partitions. It took some 90 minutes I think, the HBS log files are not very helpful. Then tested things worked.

I've had for a long time 5 options on the Windows Boot Menu: Win 11, Macrium, and 3 Safe Mode options. Hasleo had added itself to the end of these. I thought it would be nicer if it came after Macrium and was followed by the 3 Safe Mode options.

MSconfig shows the 6 options but doesn't allow for re-ordering. Ran BCDedit and could see the display order but couldn't see how to use /displayorder to change things around. Googled and found the EasyBCD utility. This gave the option of changing the display order so I arranged them as I wanted.

Restarted and found all the friendly names had changed and the items now referred to various UEFI discs (as I recall). Definitely unfriendly.

I saw the option to reset the BCD and took this. It warned me to create at least one entry else the PC wouldn't boot. So I created one for Windows and restarted. Then got message that there was no boot data (or something like that) and to use the Windows installation disk. Didn't have that so decided to use the HBS backup to restore. 5 minutes later it was finished. Rebooted and everything, in particular the Boot Menu, was back as it was before I started. Added HBS to the Boot Menu, albeit at the end.

I've now found on the Win10 Forum a tutorial how to change the order of Boot Loader entries. Think I'll hold fire for the time being!

Certainly reinforces the frequent message to back up everything.

Interesting and welcome to the club a backer-uppers. Something is wrong with the 90 minutes to backup the C: drive, maybe a typo. The 5 minutes to restore is ok as it may have only needed to restore the System partition and any delta changes to the C: partition.

Just running another full backup of the C: drive partitions with Check Image: Complete Mode. The estimated time remaining goes up every so often, currently 40 minutes to go, 21 minutes elapsed, 35% completed. I have to go out and unlike Macrium, as the Hasleo log file doesn't give timings, file size, or much else, I see no point in letting it continue so will cancel it.

tpriest said:

Just running another full backup of the C: drive partitions with Check Image: Complete Mode.

Click to expand...

The check is not really necessary, unless you suspect a corrupted drive or system.
My full system backup takes 35 seconds for 23GB, copy from and to NVMe.

I've just run a full system backup - no checking, took 49 minutes from an SD to an external USB3 drive.

By comparison Macrium Reflect does the same full system back, to the same drive, including verification, in 04:01:18.

Something very strange going on.

Just run Macrium & Hasleo system backups.
Hasleo: File size 101.59GB; Compression: default (None); Check Image: Nothing; Time 00:32:04
Macrium: File size 62.26GB; Compression: default (medium); Verify image: Yes; Time 00:16:33
The file size difference could well be the result of the compression difference. Will try to find time to do like for like in that respect.
The time difference is interesting. Hasleo takes twice as long as Macrium. Odd though that previously Hasleo took 49 minutes for the backup, the only difference I'm aware of is that was with the Disc/Partition option and selecting the the whole disc that has C: on it; the latest run was with System Backup option which, as far as I can see, selects exactly the same objects to back up.

Here's the relevant screen grabs.

My Backup using MR X takes less that two minutes and a restore is less than than that. I use an External 1TB SSD in a Wavlink Drive bay.

I have tested all of the backup solutions and only Macrium will allow you to mount an image with full access to all files/folders on the image without having to mess around with NTFS permissions.

Check the box and you have full access to everything on the image.