I’ve talked a bit about backing up your PC or laptop, but I think it’s been more about specific issues &/or tips rather than an overall guide. I want to fix that, with a sort of how-to from start to finish. Warning: it’s not a quick read.
There are several companies offering backup software, and most of it works well enough that anyone would be hard pressed to attempt any sort of ranking; with VSS built into Windows, backing up the raw data on a drive into a backup image archive is pretty straight forward, without any big technical hurtles preventing smaller developers from entering the market. Some brands have options they’d like you to believe are really important, but that stuff mostly appeals to smaller niches of users rather than any majority. The main points are: you want to back up the files & folders on a hard disk, be able to verify the integrity of a backup archive, mount that archive to copy files &/or folders, and restore that archive if necessary. The most trouble prone aspects are can your device or devices boot to the USB stick you create using whatever backup software, and is the media you use to store backup archives up to the task. If you’re not 100 % sure that the answer to both questions is yes, you can’t rely on your backups. It’s your stuff, your responsibility, and you can’t take anyone’s promises at face value. Test!
Some questions I’ve seen.
What about Windows’ own backup app? It exists, but I can’t think of any advantage to using it. What about backup apps that work in the background? The main resources used by an image backup app is reading & writing to storage – the little bit of CPU commonly used hardly makes any difference. Copying data from one place to another should be pretty bulletproof, but in my experience that’s not always the case – I’ve never had an error transferring large amounts of data if that’s all I was doing, but while it’s rare, I have gotten bad results when I was doing something else while that copying was taking place. So in my opinion you’re adding a little bit of risk to save you from having to take a 10 – 20 minute break. I’d rather take the break – you do [very much] need to get up & away from the keyboard from time to time.
Why not keep a cloned copy of my hard disk? If you’re rich, go for it, but for the rest of us an image backup stores the same data in less storage space, so you don’t have to buy and store lots of hard disks. Is there a universal backup archive format to avoid being tied to brand X? Not really. If you’re concerned that 10 years from now the company making the software might have gone out of business, restore an image backup to a dynamically expanding .vhd file, and store that [and hope Microsoft doesn’t end the .vhd format].
Backups.
There are two type of backups: files, which means your stuff, and image, which means everything on a disk. An image backup, which is what I’ll be talking about here, captures all data on a drive partition, or all data on all partitions on a disk – restoring that backup puts everything back as it was when the backup was performed, and can also be used to duplicate or clone one or more partitions on a disk. Windows itself only changes once or twice a month, so performing an image backup once or twice a month, as needed, is very often all you need. If you add or update software in between image backups, the time it would take to reinstall or reupdate that software is also often less than the time it would take to perform another backup, plus skipping that extra backup cuts down on your backup storage requirements. An obvious exception would be a GOTD.
Backing up the stuff you’re working on, and/or any videos or music should generally be done separately, on whatever schedule you feel is appropriate. You might store all your videos & music on a separate partition, and perform image backups of just that partition, or store copies of things like documents & photos. There are almost too many options for creating and storing copies of those files, on whatever schedule you choose, often with the option of storing versions of those files so you can go back, scrapping your most recent work. As I type this a copy is saved automatically to OneDrive for example, where it receives more protection than I could easily give it. But like most people in the US on cable broadband, my upload speeds are Far Too Slow to even think about storing image backups in the cloud.
Normally an image backup will just copy all data in files & folders to an archive, but you can optionally include a partition’s free space, which lets you run file recovery on a partition restored from backup. You can usually also just backup anything that’s changed since the last backup you performed – to restore that kind of backup you’ll need both that earlier backup and the current one. [Note: every hard disk, including SSDs, has at least one partition, which is necessary to store data, but that drive can also be divided up into several partitions, and those may show up in Windows Explorer as separate drive letters. With Windows 10 you’ll normally have 4 partitions: A Boot partition, a small system partition, the Windows partition, and a Recovery partition, though you can certainly add more.]
If you open Windows Explorer, right click a drive, and select Properties, the dialog that opens tells you how much of the space on that drive is used by files & folders. An image backup of that partition should take up slightly less space than that. If you back up an entire disk with more than one partition, you’ll have to add the amount of space used for each partition to get a guestimate of the total size of the backup archive. Depending on the backup software you use, it may do the work for you, telling you the estimated size of the backup archive. The 1st decision you’ll have to make is where to put it. There is no ideal solution, and the industry recommends storing duplicates of your backup archives in 3 places on different kinds of storage with one copy off site.
Where to store your backups.
Optical discs work, but transferring data is slower, and DVDs can only hold a max 8 GB, while Blu-ray with its much higher capacity has questionable longevity & reliability. Tape is out of reach for most people, so that leaves hard disk storage, internal &/or external. Most external drives connect via USB, which means slower transfer rates than internal SATA connected drives. If your PC/laptop supports UASP, an external USB drive that can use UASP helps. The USB naming specs are a confusing mess, but the newer, faster modes can give a big performance boost, if you get one of them working the way it’s supposed to, which may not always be as easy as it looks. All hard disks [including SSDs] fail, some more often than others, while read/write speeds vary, so research is important. A mirrored disk setup stores everything more than once – each mirrored drive is an exact copy – which gives you some insurance in case one drive fails. Storing more than the latest backup can help, since you’re not always immediately aware of a problem [like malware], but it increases the amount of space you’ll need for backup storage. Ransomware can target backups, so having the drive with your stored backups disconnected can help – so can having multiple external drives in case one gets infected.
That said, the cheapest route is to add a partition to your existing hard disk to store your backups. The big weakness to this approach is that if that hard drive fails, you’re out of luck, since both Windows and your backup will be inaccessible. While not as fast as using a second internal drive, it is faster than using an external USB drive, and you can mitigate the risk by copying backups to an external drive afterwards. Since the space for an additional partition has to come from an existing partition, the size of both the disk and your backups matters. Usually the largest partition – the one most likely having the space you’ll need – is the Windows partition, with drive letter C:. Checking the properties of drive C: in Windows Explorer will give you an idea of how big a single image backup will be, show how much free space there is, and if there’s enough space to form that added partition. If for example you’ve got 40 GB of storage used, and 300 GB unused, no problem, but if you’ve got 100 GB in use and only 50 GB free, it’s not going to work. Remember that it’s a good idea to leave at least 20-30 GB of free space for Windows, and if the drive is an SSD, it’s best to only ½ fill it.
The first step to adding a partition is to defrag the drive you’re going to take space away from, probably C: -- you can use Windows built-in tool [right click the drive in Windows Explorer & go to Optimize on the Tools tab of Properties] or the 3rd party tool of your choice. What this does is pack all the files and folders towards the beginning of the partition, so they’re not effected when you shrink the size of that partition, making room for the new one. Next, you’ll make that partition smaller, and create a new one in the now unallocated space – the space that’s left over when you make the partition smaller.
You can use Windows built-in tools by going to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management, and then selecting Disk Management on the lower left. Using that you right click the partition and select Shrink Volume, & then the right click menus to create, name, & format a new one. I recommend using a third-party tool however, like AOMEI’s Partition Assistant – there’s a free version, while the Pro version is sometimes given away [it’s been on GOTD]. Using that you right click the partition [in either the upper or lower partition display], select Resize/Move partition, click the right arrows next to the size of the partition in the upper left, then either fill in the blanks or drag the partition to reduce its size. Click the Apply button, then right click the newly empty space, selecting create partition, & once again click Apply.
[Note: With the new partition you’re adding a drive letter, and that can shift any other drive letters that are set up in Windows. You may for example have a shortcut that points to drive D:. only it’s no longer drive D:, so now that shortcut won’t work. If you go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management, and then select Disk Management on the lower left, you can right click a partition or drive & change the drive letter. Sometimes it may be necessary to choose a letter temporarily to free up that drive’s previous letter, then select the desired letter once it’s free.]
Performing the backup.
Backup archives take up space, and the larger the archive file(s), the longer it takes to write them and, if needed, read them to restore a backup. Since you want the smallest file possible, you want to clear out as much garbage as possible before you run the backup, running Disk Cleanup [right click a drive & select properties], clicking Clean up system files on the 1st dialog, and manually clearing the Temp folders [C:\Users\ [UserName]\ AppData\ Local\ Temp\ and C:\ Windows\ Temp\] . You can also use the dialog in Settings -> System -> Storage, but I’ve had it sometimes not work properly or well. If you run the backup while using another copy of Windows [something I’ll talk more on in a minute] you can also delete the swapfile.sys & pagefile.sys files from the Windows partition you’re backing up, and the backup archive will be a little smaller.
While most image backup apps are very easy to use, and most will work very well, the make or break feature is the bootable USB sticks they’ll create, which can be a hassle to use, and too often won’t work on your device(s). Because of that I recommend Macrium Reflect Free. To use it you select a drive, then click “Image this disk…” below it – or you can select a partition, and under Actions, select “Image this partition only…” – or check the boxes for the partitions on a disk that you want to include, and click “Image this disk…”. Any of those brings up a dialog where you select the location where you want to save the backup, then just click Next & follow the simple wizard.
Restoring the backup.
This is where things get tricky, because the copy of Windows you want to restore can’t be running when you do it. If Windows will run OK, you can start the backup app, choose to restore the backup, and it’ll write basically the same mini version of the app to the hard drive that it would write to a USB stick. After a reboot that mini version will start, and after selecting the backup to restore, you show it where to restore that backup, and away you go. Potential problems include if Windows won’t run OK, and if that mini version will start & work on your PC or laptop. You can start to restore a backup, make sure the mini app works after a reboot, then cancel before actually restoring a backup, or even restore the backup if you want as a test.
Or you can create the bootable USB stick in the backup app and see if it’ll work to boot your PC or laptop. The advantage is that nothing is written to your hard drive, while the disadvantage is that it can be a hassle to use. The BIOS in your device looks for the operating system files on the drive that’s selected in its settings – you have to change that from the partition that holds Windows boot files [normally shown as Windows Boot Loader] to the USB stick. Some devices have a hot key or combo that will bring up a menu just for this when the device is starting from off [not hibernation]. With some devices you have to go into the BIOS settings to make the change, and sometimes you can do that by pressing a hot key or combo. And sometimes you have to go through Windows special maintenance boot menu to get to the BIOS settings. Generally, that means pressing the shift key when clicking to restart – rivernetcomputers[.]com/5-ways-windows-10-boot-options-menu/ -- and there’s a Windows hot key that works during booting – F8. There’s a catch to using it… It’s Really hard to time it right if the standard Windows boot menu isn’t displayed, and much easier if that menu’s on screen for several seconds. A few times I’ve used the free EasyBCD to add a fake copy or entry of Windows to that boot menu to make sure it appeared, just for that reason.
Now, while the USB stick you create in your backup app usually works just fine, there are potential problems… Windows 10 can change the BIOS’ list of what drives are available to boot from, with only the Windows Boot Loader shown, so there’s no USB stick to select – restoring the BIOS default setting should bring it back, but may alter other settings too, so you should write them down so that you can put things back the way that they were. Another potential problem is that the BIOS may not go back to normal after booting to a USB stick – on this PC I have to change the boot drive in the BIOS back to the Windows Boot Loader after using a hot key boot menu to select the USB stick. There are 3 possible BIOS types: Legacy, UEFI, and a hybrid combination of the two, and some BIOS are capable of 2 or 3 of those modes. That means that the USB stick might be shown on the boot drive list or menu twice, once with the notation UEFI – all you can do is try one, and if it doesn’t work, try another. Most bootable USB sticks include both the Legacy and UEFI boot loaders, and this can sometimes confuse the BIOS, so it won’t boot from the USB stick. If the USB stick won’t work, you can try to rename or delete the folder with one of those boot loaders – again try it one way and if that doesn’t work, put it back and eliminate the other. The UEFI boot loader is in a folder named EFI, while the Legacy boot loader is in a folder named Boot. And finally, some bootable USB sticks just won’t work on some devices – that can be caused by the USB stick itself, with the fix being to try another brand/model of USB stick, or it can be caused by the way that the backup software developers designed their bootable USB sticks. I suggest Macrium Reflect since their USB sticks work more often than any others.
Most backup software uses WinPE, a very minimal version of Windows for their bootable USB sticks, as well as any optional bootable backup environment on disk. WinPE USB sticks generally work by creating a RAM disk, a more-or-less fake hard disk entirely in RAM, then extracting & running the needed Windows files from a boot.wim file on the USB stick -- a .wim file is a Microsoft file archive format used for installation [think .zip &/or .rar]. You can mount & modify and/or update .wim files, and then compress them back into a .wim file – that’s how & why the USB stick, and most importantly the included .wim file you get with something like AOMEI Backupper is different than Macrium Reflect’s. You can get a universal copy of WinPE using Microsoft’s ADK, and if sufficiently motivated, might mix and match things a bit, e.g. mount the .wim from an AOMEI USB stick, copy the actual app, then add it to the mounted .wim from the generic WinPE USB stick, recompress that .wim file etc…
One option to [usually] avoid booting to a USB stick is to install another copy of Windows. It requires about 32 GB on average, though you can also store your backup archives on that partition – in that case you’d obviously want the partition to be larger than 32 GB. If it’s on the same drive as your main copy of Windows, you’d lose it if the hard drive failed. With Win10, a 2nd copy of Win10 should automatically activate without needing a 2nd license key, and you’d install & use a full version of your backup software. Being a full copy of Win10, it will normally start faster and perform better than booting to a USB stick, while also providing you with near instant access to another copy of Windows in case your main copy breaks. You can also install and run software that doesn’t always have its own bootable USB sticks, e.g. for file recovery or off-line virus scans.
To add a 2nd copy of Win10 you start by deciding where you want to put it. You might have or install a smaller SSD, e.g. 120 or 240 GB, which could be fine as-is, but if you want to use a smaller portion of a hard disk, say the single hard disk in most devices where the original copy of Windows lives, you’ll have to create a new partition. Then boot to a USB stick with the installation files, start the setup routine as necessary, and tell it to install Win10 on the partition you’ve set aside. To get a USB stick with the setup files, use the Media Creation Tool to either save an ISO file, creating a bootable USB stick using the free rufus, or create a bootable USB stick using the Creation Tool itself. Generally, the latter is recommended, but rufus can give you a few more options if you have trouble booting to that USB stick. microsoft[.]com/en-us/software-download/windows10%20
A final option is to create a Windows To Go drive. Unlike earlier versions, Win10 will run just fine on a USB stick or drive – the only thing special about it is the boot loader files. When you run the setup files for Win10 you cannot select a USB stick or drive as the destination, so you have to use a special program to create a Windows To Go drive – I recommend the free rufus, used with a Win10 setup ISO. It uses a Microsoft tool called DISM to copy the needed files from the .wim file on that ISO, but doing it that way rufus cannot add needed drivers – that means that the first time you boot to the Win2Go drive Win10 will run a part of its setup routine to find and add the most basic of those drivers. Once it’s running you can add more, same as if you just installed Win10 normally. Win2Go does not work well on a USB stick – it works but is unbearably slow – so I recommend a small, cheap SSD in an external housing, on sale about $20 & $5, respectively. A Win2Go drive has the advantages of using a 2nd copy of Windows, plus the advantages of an external drive that can be used on most any device that can run Windows 10.
Restoring a backup somewhere besides the original drive.
Restoring an image backup to a new or different drive is basically the same thing as cloning, the difference being that it’s done in 2 steps, creating the backup and restoring it. One advantage is that both drives don’t have to be connected to the same device at the same time, but otherwise it’s just a matter of which method you prefer. Windows 10 is generally pretty adaptable – an installed copy of Windows 10 will adapt or adjust itself to work on most devices that can run Windows – so restoring a backup to a drive on a new or different PC or laptop usually will work. It’s the same restoring a backup to a VHD [Virtual Hard Disk] to use in a VM, or if you want to boot to a VHD.
Potential problems are that Windows might deactivate itself, depending on the license you have, boot files may need to be installed, replaced, or edited, and while a copy of Windows 10 that you’ve already installed somewhere else will *usually* work with different hardware, including the emulated hardware VMs use, that’s nowhere near a 100% guarantee.
There’s not much you can do about needing another license, though reports are the free upgrade from Win7 & 8 still works, so if you happen to have one of those keys you haven’t used to upgrade yet, that’s a possible solution. Plus, non-activated Window 10 is not anywhere near as crippled as earlier versions – you can’t personalize it, but otherwise it’s fully functional. If a copy of Win10 won’t work on different hardware there’s not much you can do about it. You can see if it’ll work in a VM, then remove any software & drivers specific to the original hardware, &/or try reinstalling Win10, keeping your files & software, which can remove some of the old hardware-specific stuff. The paid, pro version of some backup software, like Paragon & Macrium Reflect include a tool to migrate Windows to different hardware, but you have to buy the software to find out if it will work – it may not. [Win10 added a file when run on an Asus motherboard I had, and that file prevented that copy of Win10 from running on several other devices, but it wasn’t part of any drivers, and wasn’t referenced in the registry, so software migration tools didn’t touch it.]
RE: Boot file problems… Installing Windows 10 normally adds 4 partitions to a hard disk – a FAT32 boot partition, a tiny [16 MB] system partition, the Windows partition, and a Recovery partition. Win10 works fine without the Recovery partition – you just can’t reset that copy of Win10. If/when you want to use that copy of Win10 somewhere else, you generally want to include at least the boot, system, & Windows partitions, and usually that should work fine, but there are problems that can sometimes come up.
1st the basics… Win10 can include 2 sets of boot files [BCD], one for Legacy Bios [sometimes wrongly referred to as MBR], and one for UEFI BIOS, and they are normally found on the hidden FAT32 boot partition. If the hard disk with Windows on it is formatted MBR rather than GPT, those boot files can be on the Windows partition instead. The hidden part usually means nowadays that the partition doesn’t have a drive letter, but older versions of Win10 also protected the boot partition so simply adding a drive letter wouldn’t [will not] work. A PC or laptop can have more than one set of boot files – you just have to specify which set to use in the BIOS. As Win10 evolves, its boot files change along with it, so something that did not work before may work now, & vice versa.
If you want to add a previously installed copy of Win10 to a device that already has a copy of Win10 installed [just without all your software for example], I’d suggest just restoring a backup of the Windows partition to a partition [or drive] on the target device, then running the original copy of Win10, and use the free EasyBCD to add the 2nd copy to the boot menu. If the previously installed copy of Win10 was installed on a device that used Legacy Bios, but the new PC or laptop you want to move it to uses UEFI, then you *may* have to add the UEFI boot files [they may or may not be there on the boot partition already]. And sometimes, after restoring a backup of Win10 to another drive, in the same PC/laptop or in another PC/laptop, that copy of Win10 will not boot or start.
Backup software like the paid version from Macrium lets you create a bootable USB stick that includes tools to repair the boot files, and if it works [it may not], that’s likely the easiest solution. [Note; on an earlier version of Win10, tools like Macrium’s were the only way to get existing boot files to work on an NVMe drive, but that no longer seems to be the case.] Otherwise you have to repair or replace the boot files. To do that you need to assign the boot partition a drive letter, which means you have to access the hard disk with a working copy of Windows or WinPE, either connecting the hard disk to a working Windows device, or booting to a USB stick with something like WinPE on it, or booting to a Windows To Go drive. If adding a drive letter doesn’t work because the partition is protected [somewhat common on older versions of Win10], it’s probably easiest to delete the existing boot partition and create a new one that won’t be protected. Windows includes a CLI app called BCDBoot to create & add boot files to that [or any] partition – its built in help (“/?”) is probably more useful than the docs Microsoft provides on its web site. Windows also includes the CLI BCDEdit for changing or editing those files – again use /?. The free EasyBCD can run portably [e.g. from a WinPE USB stick], and does more easier, but won’t do everything, and is starting to get a little bit dated.