Hat tip to bristolflanker at https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/cloning-a-hard-drive/#post-9918400 for highlighting this offer.  I thought this deserved its own thread, as it’s a great deal and some folk might otherwise miss it buried in another discussion.

There’s a “my hard drive died, how do I recover my life’s work” thread created on STW with depressing regularity. Restoring data from backups is easy, recovering data from failed hard drives is hard (and if you end up having to pay for professional forensic recovery, you’re looking at paying about a grand for it).

Tomorrow is World Backup Day. AOMEI is celebrating this by giving away the Pro version of its backup software (usually ~£50) for free. Offer ends April 1st, so get to it quickly.

To get it, download and install the trial version of AOMEI Backupper Pro from https://www.backup-utility.com/free-trial.html then click the ‘Purchase’ link at the top and register with the license key AMPR-1R75D-YS3W1-45ZV6.

Coincidentally, last week I was looking for free backup software for both myself and a non-techie user to use. I read a load of comparison reviews, installed and tried out a few, and this is the one I decided to stick with. It’s early days for me with it yet but it appears to be a good bit of kit: dead simple interface, quick, and with no BS foisterware in the installer. Grabbing the Pro version for nowt was a no-brainer.

Good PSA, but as a definately non-expert PC user, is this really an issue for home users these days? Surely Google Drive or MS OneDrive if you have an Office 365 subscription is the way to go for documents, photo’s and stuff.

An honest question, feel free to try and change my opinion.

Nice one.  My laptop is getting a bit flaky (it’s really old and has been properly hammered!) so this will come in handy.  Even if it’s only to backup years of photos, videos and gpx files that I occasionally backup to a separate hard drive manually, making it easy will mean I do it more often.

Surely Google Drive or MS OneDrive if you have an Office 365 subscription is the way to go for documents, photo’s and stuff.

I’d say that best practice is to have both.  There’s an adage in IT that if you don’t have your data in three places, you don’t have your data.

Having it local is convenient.  It’s fast to backup and restore, and isn’t reliant on a good Internet connection.  You can do a full system backup so you can do a “bare metal” restore to get back up and running quickly and easily if your hard disk goes pop.  You’ve also essentially got unlimited storage (in so far as you can run out and buy a bigger USB drive) rather than being restricted to whatever Google / Microsoft decide is your storage limit (which I think is about 15GB for free accounts).  If you’re just backing up a few photos and documents then that’s probably ample; if you’re backing up loads of large media files like videos then you’re going to be hitting limits pretty quickly.

Conversely, having it in the cloud is robust.  An external HDD is a single point of failure – if you come to restore and find that the backup drive has failed or the backup is otherwise corrupt, you’re hosed.  Online you’ll have the luxury of a provider’s own backup policies and redundant servers for your data.  It’s also offsite – having a backup on a USB drive next to your PC won’t do you any good if you’re burgled, flooded, or your house burns down (though of course you might have bigger concerns than your holiday photos in that case…)  My solution to this historically was to back up to an external disk and then leave the disk at my mum’s, but that leads me to taking backups annually which isn’t ideal either.

Surely Google Drive or MS OneDrive if you have an Office 365 subscription is the way to go for documents, photo’s and stuff.

Cloud storage is NOT NOT NOT a substitute for a backup.  If you accidentally delete something, edit it wrongly, software goes bonkers and deletes it, or a virus corrupts it, then your computer will sync the edit, deletion or corruption to the cloud exactly as it’s supposed to, and you’re screwed.

I think some of them have some options to keep history, but still, it’s not the same.  That only works for your documents anyway.  You need to back up properly.

@Cougar – what’s the benefit of this over the standard Windows 10 functionality?

This is where Windows 10 File History is good, in that it creates a copy of your files each time you update them, and adds the date and time to the filename. So if you delete a big chunk of your first novel, your cloud backup will also be missing the same chunk, but your file history will have a copy of the previous save. (Or at least, the one you did an hour ago, depending on settings).

With Windows 10 hard links, you can also add the file history folder to your ondrive folder, so it gets copied to the cloud as well.

But still have a local copy or two.

@Cougar – what’s the benefit of this over the standard Windows 10 functionality?

I’ll be honest, I’ve never used the W10 one.  I’ve been burned more than once with Windows Backup (pre-Windows 10) before now so didn’t care much to look at it.

My experience with the built-in Windows backup is that it’s clunky, short on features, slow, and takes up shitloads of disk space.  It’s also really finicky about Windows versions, which is a right PITA if you’ve archived something off and want to come back to it months or years later to find that your OS version has changed (or you’re on a different PC).  The Windows 10 one could be much improved, I don’t know.

Can it do bare metal recovery these days?  With AOMEI (and many other third-party backup applications) you can create a “rescue CD” boot disc so that in the event of a catastrophic failure you can boot from the CD, point it at the recovery image and go “off you go then.”  I’m only guessing and could be wrong but I’d expect the Windows equivalent to be “step 1: reinstall Windows” before you can actually do a system restore?

Well W7 had two backup features, AIUI – system imaging, and the file backup thing.  File backups were a PITA because as far as I can tell it wasn’t incremental, and there was no way to limit it to a certain amount of storage or number of backups.  You had to wait for the disk space warning then manually clear stuff out.  System imaging on the other hand was much better – it was incremental, and you could set sensible controls on storage.  And somehow it worked when you were using the system unlike any option I found for Linux. You could then restore straight from a backup by booting from the recovery partition or USB or whatever, without having to install Windows first.

Windows 10 has these legacy features, but also has file history.  I think you can choose where it stores file history too.  And you just have to right click -> properties to see the history.  It’s pretty good.

Cobian is a great free backup tool too.

File history in Windows 10 is quite different to the old backups (though they hide the rather useful whole drive imaging backup option, but it’s still there).

It simply saves a copy of the current saved file under a drive you select for the backups, with the name appended with version/date information. Thus you get multiple copies and it can then show you the history to roll back to.

It does consume a lot of space potentially and issue there if you are modifying very large files. Though not sure if it does anything more clever there.

I have file history set to point to my NAS for key folders. I don’t generally bother with a whole drive backup these days but occasionally I’ll do an image just to save the hassle of reinstalling everything, but reinstalling isn’t so much hassle now and the recovery options to reset Windows do a pretty good job.

On top I have OneDrive, plus a further external drive backing up the NAS.

Another Windows feature, possibly just in Pro onwards, is offline files. So the files can be on a server / NAS via a shared drive, but you mark the files or drive as offline, so it effectively syncs between local and server. Kind of like OneDrive but without the cloud.

Agree on File History, it’s great now.  Almost works as well as Time Machine on OSX but without the fancy UI and app integration.

The whole drive backup on 10 is crap though, every machine I’ve tried it on works a few times then eventually gets stuck mid backup with permission errors and will never recover.  God knows what’s wrong. It doesn’t log anything, just a generic error code.

I use AEOMI for that now and File History for day to day stuff.

Also use CrashPlan for offsite backup, but the scamps have closed the service down, so I’m looking for a replacement (any recommendations anyone?)

Thanks for the PSA

I’ve used Acronis in the past but it caused issues on my system so the AOMEI looks interesting.

Is the Tech Radar freebie legit though? The AOMEI website itself is only offering Buy One Get One Free for Backupper Professional for World Backup Day (although the registration code works).

Posted on the wrong thread on cloning just now …

Is Macrium Reflect still a good choice?