Best Software for Full Disk Image Backups?

woldsweather · Mar 29, 2023

Did I read Macrium is coming to an end? Is there a better one?

I have Windows on C and MOST software installed to D can I still get back my PC exactly as it is today with a full image back up? Do I image C and D in two operations?

DigitalGoat · Mar 29, 2023

Macrium is not coming to an end, the free version is and the pricing structure may well change going forward. I suggest you read the details on the Macrium website for upcoming changes so that you can be best informed.

You can image the whole drive with all partitions (I am assuming here you have C & D partitions on one disk?).

Your question is really two questions, the part about how to backup/ image a system with multiple partitions/ disks efficiently and with no issues on restore would be better asked seperately and with more detail, such as screenshots of disk management, the type of image you require and your expectations of the restore process and results.

There are plenty of examples and methods listed in the tutorials section of these forums for Macrium and other backup/ imaging apps.

Try3 · Mar 29, 2023

woldsweather said:
Did I read Macrium is coming to an end?

No.
You might have read that its free version will no longer be updated after early next year.
Future Macrium versions will merely offer a free 30 day trial instead of a perpetually free version.

woldsweather said:
Is there a better one?

There are several utilities for the job. Some are identified in
my ditty - File backup vs imaging, imaging utilities, backing up drivers [post #3] - TenForums

woldsweather said:
I have Windows on C and MOST software installed to D can I still get back my PC exactly as it is today with a full image back up?

Yes. As long as the image is set to contain both drives and its restoration is set to restore both drives.

woldsweather said:
Do I image C and D in two operations?

You can image C & D in a single operation.

All the best,
Denis

hdmi · Mar 29, 2023

Technically, you can't end that which has already ended. lol Of course the free version of Macrium is not the same as the paid one, but since this same question keeps popping up at a rate that is faster than world's fastest NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD is capable to keep up with, I'll repeat only this:

http://dl.acronis.com/s/AcronisTrueImage2021_39287.iso

Copy the file on a USB flash drive after the USB flash drive has been formatted with Ventoy. That's it.. now you have the best.

davehc · Mar 29, 2023

I am using a two year old (Free) release. It has been updated a couple of times and I am now using version 8.7379
Should the update service stop, it bothers me not. I presume my copy will continue working. It makes an image and restores it. That is all I require,

TechnoMage2021 · Apr 7, 2023

If C: and D: are on the same disk, backing up both at the same time is called "Cloning".
All you need is another disk big enough to hold the resulting image. Bigger, is better.

If you can no longer rely on MR, then use something else.

Ghot · Apr 7, 2023

Among other things, Macrium will do the following...

Backup and restore the Windows partitions required to boot
Backup and restore and entire disk
Backup and restore as many partitions on as many disks as you'd like, all at the same time.

Generally, the smart move is to make a backup of the partitions required to boot into Windows... and then, if desired, make backup(s) of whatever other partitions you'd like.
That way, if Windows breaks it won't take forever to "restore" Windows to working order.
Also... the Windows partitions generally change more often than the partitions on storage drives.

So... in short, you can include C: and D: in one backup.

\

So yours would probably look like this...

IF... the only things ON the Windows disk, are C:, the EFI partition, the Recovery partition, and the D: partition...
you could just choose to backup the whole disk, that Windows lives on.

MisterEd · Apr 7, 2023

hdmi said:
Technically, you can't end that which has already ended. lol Of course the free version of Macrium is not the same as the paid one, but since this same question keeps popping up at a rate that is faster than world's fastest NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD is capable to keep up with, I'll repeat only this:

http://dl.acronis.com/s/AcronisTrueImage2021_39287.iso
Copy the file on a USB flash drive after the USB flash drive has been formatted with Ventoy. That's it.. now you have the best.

Acronis 2021. Ugh. It was the worst and last standalone version. I had 3 licensed copies of Acronis True Image 2021 and was so disgusted I downgraded them all to Acronis True Image 2018.

cereberus · Apr 7, 2023

MisterEd said:
Acronis 2021. Ugh. It was the worst and last standalone version. I had 3 licensed copies of Acronis True Image 2021 and was so disgusted I downgraded them all to Acronis True Image 2018.

Totally agree - Acronis is awful. Lost of bugs - crap support blah blah blah.

MisterEd · Apr 7, 2023

cereberus said:
Totally agree - Acronis is awful. Lost of bugs - crap support blah blah blah.

In addition to back up my desktops and laptops I was using ATI 2021 to back up my phone. Now I use ATI 2018 to do that. I have no problem with ATI 2018.

I have been using ATI since ATI 2015. Even back then there were bugs that were only corrected in newer releases. ATI 2017 had bugs that were only fixed in ATI 2018. Then things went downhill from there. The biggest mistake they made was incorporate security into it which only seem to slow it down.

ATI 2021's GUI was painfully slow. The last straw was when the phone backup broke. ATI's said my only option was to buy a subscription. I counter-offered by asking to downgrade to 3 licenses for ATI 2018 which I already had one license for. They agreed to it but only if I paid a handling fee. I said no. They finally let me downgrade for no cost.

hdmi · Apr 7, 2023

MisterEd said:
Acronis 2021. Ugh. It was the worst and last standalone version. I had 3 licensed copies of Acronis True Image 2021 and was so disgusted I downgraded them all to Acronis True Image 2018.

No, it isn't Acronis 2021. Rather, it is the Linux based bootable Rescue Media ISO file thereof. Booting straight into this ISO file with Ventoy before using it to create an image of an average size Windows partition takes only a few minutes on a fast NVMe SSD. In situations where this same Windows partition is the only partition with enough free space to create the image file on, this is what will save your day whereas Macrium will throw an error message basically telling you that you need to pick a destination folder that is not located on any of the partitions that you want to be included in the image. Another thing is that the menu structure you get when you boot into this bootable Rescue Media ISO of Acronis is very straightforward. For example, when you want to specify what files/folders you need to be excluded from the image, you can simply add/remove/edit entries on a list and use wildcards also if needed. Whereas Macrium forces you to edit the Windows registry to be able to achieve the same... it's nowhere near practical by any stretch.

With the bootable Rescue Media ISO of Acronis the image verification step will be performed right after the image is created, if you check the Verify image checkbox that appears after you start the image creation task. Between creating the image and verifying it, no data will be written to the source. This and the fact that the verification is the same as doing a full restore except the data from the image will be compared to the source data (as opposed to will be written to disk) is what makes this verification robust and reliable. This is because the chance of a read error going twice undetected producing the same read result twice is a lot smaller than the chance of a snapshot capturing inconsistent data while Windows and various processes running are still actively writing data to disk during (and after) this capture. During this same capture the data will only be read once so cannot fully be verified after, as the source data will have already been modified before the verification can begin. With the above described image verification step, the images that the bootable Rescue Media ISO of Acronis creates are pretty much as reliable as reliable can be. The difference between this verification and doing an actual restore are kept to an absolute minimum to help ensure that reliability will be robust in nature, and, due to the fact that this ISO file is based on Linux, personally, I, think it's safe for me to assume I won't be running into any unexpected bugs in it that might cause the data stored on my 2TB Samsung 980 Pro to be either damaged permanently or lost.

Image validation is not the same as image verification, BTW. If part of the data gets modified during and after the capture, then the verification will fail so there will be no point even trying, but the validation can still be successful nevertheless, as the latter only checks whether the data can be successfully restored, it doesn't compare the data from image to the actual source data. Those who claim that verification is unnecessary because they never ran into problems with mere validation essentially are saying that fire insurance is unnecessary because their house never caught on fire. Not pointing at you here, but this is what the vast majority of people on here have been calling a 'system backup'. The reality is that, on a normal PC with Windows running normally on it, a Windows system image does not qualify as a backup unless Windows had been taken offline before creating the image with proper verification. It simply does not meet the definition of a backup. The term 'partial backup' applies, but then, you probably already knew almost all of what I have explained so far, and I'm sure you also already know that my verified image that I was referring to still doesn't qualify as a backup until I've made multiple copies of it in such a way that it meets all of the other criteria that are necessary to be able to call it that.

My only point is, since the thread title is about making full disk image backups with software, either you need to write protect the disk or you need to boot into an environment that doesn't modify the data of interest. In both cases it means that Windows can't be running on the disk, and, in turn, this means that you can use neither the installed version of Macrium nor the installed version of Acronis nor any other program that requires to be installed on, and requires to be running on, your Windows installation if your goal is to make a full image backup that includes this same Windows installation. (There is a reason why the user guide of FTKImager mentions something about using a hardware write protection on your source disk before you start to create your image with it, but like I said I feel confident enough that the bootable Rescue Media ISO of Acronis won't corrupt my source data due to some unexpected bug in it.)

Finally, in the strict sense of the word 'full', a full disk image also means that the image can't be created on the source disk and no file/folder exclusions can be specified, and the type of image has to be sector-by-sector so unused sectors will also be included in the image. But it also is fairly common to use the description of 'full' more loosely, i.e. to refer to all the data of interest (i.e. specifying to exclude e.g. the Windows swapfile, cache files, partitions' free available space and unallocated disk space, etc.). Either way, it still boils down to one thing only: no real verification, no real backup. There's imaging software and there's imagining software─where backups don't exist outside of people's imagination. lol

hdmi · Apr 8, 2023

MisterEd said:
In addition to back up my desktops and laptops I was using ATI 2021 to back up my phone. Now I use ATI 2018 to do that. I have no problem with ATI 2018.

I have been using ATI since ATI 2015. Even back then there were bugs that were only corrected in newer releases. ATI 2017 had bugs that were only fixed in ATI 2018. Then things went downhill from there. The biggest mistake they made was incorporate security into it which only seem to slow it down.

ATI 2021's GUI was painfully slow. The last straw was when the phone backup broke. ATI's said my only option was to buy a subscription. I counter-offered by asking to downgrade to 3 licenses for ATI 2018 which I already had one license for. They agreed to it but only if I paid a handling fee. I said no. They finally let me downgrade for no cost.

I have NEVER encountered any bugs in the bootable Rescue Media ISO of Acronis, but I did encounter slowdowns/freezes of the GUI in it, albeit that was easily worked around by pulling the Ethernet cable out of the PC, and, the build I linked in my first post in this thread does NOT suffer from this issue, at least not as far as I have been able to tell. (I have tested it on multiple machines BTW.) The bootable Rescue Media ISO of Acronis does NOT incorporate the security features that you are referring to here. As for phone backups, I do NOT use my phone to create full disk image backups, and also I do NOT think the OP has mentioned anything about using a phone. (Different jobs very often require different tools.) What I think is that some people on here have VERY serious difficulty making the proper distinction between the installed version of Acronis and the bootable Rescue Media ISO of Acronis. I could be wrong, but... by now, the observation that they ALWAYS keep talking about the installed version of Acronis while persistently avoiding to talk about the bootable Rescue Media ISO of Acronis seems to clearly suggest exactly that.