Daily Incrementals of DISK IMAGE, not Files

It’s great that Leo recommends daily Incremental backups, but I suggest that rather than simply doing them on Files, there are big advantages to doing them on the entire Disk Image.

Doing so takes a little more time to run for the periodic base backups, but virtually no more time for daily Incrementals.

And the advantages are very great: one saves all the time of reinstalling and reconfiguring programs, and running updates, when one’s system drive fails or is hit by malware.

And Image backups can do everything that File backups can: one can always grab files and folders out of the Images.

I’ve been doing this for a quarter century, and so nothing that’s happened to a backed up drive has ever been more than a momentary inconvenience. (Of vital importance to me since I have limited hand use because of carpal tunnel.)

I know some people like to have to reinstall their OS (or roll back to the initial Image Leo recommends), but there’s nothing stopping them from doing that if they want to just because they have another option.

(On Windows I had been using Acronis, but I’m thinking of switching to Macrium.)

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Agree with this, however the caveat being that a disk image backup might not be as user-friendly as a file backup for some users. We’re talking about OS reinstalls like potato chips, but that’s an incredibly daunting and confusing concept to many users. Especially those that probably need backups the most.

I’m certainly in favor of disk images however, at least for filesystems I have control over.

Hello, knewmannnnn!

Good point; I know that Leo aims to help the most people, and to do that one wants to keep it simple.

It probably is a little more complicated to grab file/folders from a file/folder backup than from an image. (Even though programs mount the image and provide an interface.) And most people probably install a tiny fraction of the number of programs I need to, so doing that over is a fraction as daunting to them.

Honestly I’ve never made a file/folder backup. Even for a non-system drive, used simply for storage. I just really like the ability to blast an image onto a new drive when the old one dies. (I’ve had about 60 drives die.)

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Wow :face_with_raised_eyebrow: I’ve NEVER had a drive die while in use on any PC, in 40 years…

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Here are some:

And here’s an mp4 of me knocking them down like dominos: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gB0SUYPt4mOrHFyuw0sCkS1aOuB_CE7X/view?usp=sharing

(The deal is that I use a lot of drives, because I create and d/l a lot of content.)

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I switched my main PC to Linux last year. Before I re-formatted, I made an image using the free (for private use) Veeam Windows Client backup. It imaged the 3 SSDs and the 2TB HDD into a single image on an external drive.

I then installed Linux, but it had a lot of problems - Bluetooth drop outs, long pauses when opening applications (video playback in Firefox would pause for 5 seconds, if I opened the mail program, for example), this on an 8 core, 32GB workstation just running Firefox, not what I was expecting.

I rolled back to Windows. I booted from the USB stick that Veeam had produced as part of the backup and let it do its thing. It had restored the whole shebang in around an hour, all 4 drives, as they were, all data, as it was. I only needed to Windows update for the missing month’s patches and I was ready to go.

I’ve been using Veeam Backup & Replication for VMware at work for over half a decade and it is a great product. The Veeam client for Windows is easy to use and I loved the fact, that it made a recovery USB-Stick to rebuild the system, I just had to remember the master password to unencrypt the backup, although I think that was optional and my personal security paranoia.

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