Free Backup/Recovery, VM and more

bpgreen

13 years ago

Paragon Software has a number of programs that are available free for personal use.

One is a backup/restore program that images a drive and also allows for incremental backups.

You can also create a VM of one PC to run in another.

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Backup

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Comments (5)

ravencajun Zone 8b TX
13 years ago
another imaging program that is free that I found out about recently is this one
EASEUS Todo Backup
jane__ny
13 years ago
I don't understand what these products are. Could they be helpful with my situation?

Jane
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what acronis does is different than just doing a back up of files, acronis takes a snap shot of your entire hard drive including the operating system so it is an image, then should you need to restore from it you would be restoring every single thing including the operating system. In doing just data and file backups should you need to do a full reformat then you would need to have either a copy of your operating system cd to re-install your OS or the recovery cd, and then you could use your file and data backups to put those back in place once you had re-installed your OS and done all the many updates for it, which can be a long and tedious procedure. So it is a better way to backup when using an image you can be back up and running in very short order at the exact point in time that you did your last image save. You could certainly leave the data you have saved on the external hard drive and just make a new folder to put your acronis images into you seem to have plenty of room available. Usually the acronis version that comes with a branded drive may be a bit different than the stand alone version of acronis you can buy but I would think it would be just fine. there are some very good tutorials available on how to use acronis if you need those just ask or google for it. In my opinion an image backup is the best way to go.
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I'm assuming that you are making 'compressed' backup sets. Such a backup set is one large file that contains a compressed set of all the files chosen for backup. It has a special file structure. Keep in mimd that it is only one big file. Incremental backup stores only new-files and changed-files written since the last backup. You start with a full backup and then periodically do incremental backups. At some point, it is advisable to start over with a new full backup. Here's why. To restore a file set containing incremental backups, you have to start with the full backup set and then restore all incremental backups in the same order as they were written. In this way, all file revisions gets restored in proper order ending with the last version. Newer versions of a file overwrites the older version. A minor nusiance can appear. Old deleted files can reappear. For example, suppose you had file "A" and it was included in the first incremental backup. later, it was discarded and does not appear in later incremental backups. It will reappear while doing a full restore. A lot of folks do not use incremental backups, but do only full backups. Its less confusing, but uses much more storage space and time. I simplify my backups by not using a compressed backup set. I keep all my improtant data on one logical drive. Since I have a very large external drive, I merely make an ordinary copy of my data drive to the external drive. To enhance relibility (life) of the backup drive, it is turned off most of the time and turned on only for file copying. These days, RAID arrays is the popular way to maintain files. RAID has the advantage of automatically keepng duplicate files and can recover from a loss of one of the drives in the array. I'm not sure about the minimum number of drives required to gurantee a recovery from the loss of s drive.
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no you could not use the OS part of your old one when putting it on the latest OS version only on the same OS, if you felt that your pc may soon crash or something and you would want to just put it back exactly as it is then you could use a program that would basically clone that drive including the Operating system and all, a snapshot in time of exactly how it is when you do the image save. There are some good free programs for doing that and it is pretty easy to do. If you choose to just save your data that can be done too, just drag and drop the folders you want to save onto a flash drive or DVD's or an external drive. Usually that would be any documents, pictures, music, videos, bookmarks and profiles, possibly email, etc that you would want to transfer to your new pc or just keep stored and safe. this article has a lot of info on various types of backup What Files Should You Backup On Your Windows PC? Top 10 Files to Backup one of the free imaging programs Macrium Reflect FREE Edition
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System Restore is usually from your "C:\System Volume Information" a hidden folder by default. Sounds like your D has the OEM install files on it.. to revert your computer hard drive back to Out of the Box new condition. If you didn't delete any of it :) .... An image of your C drive made by a program like Macrium will usually compress to about half the total used bytes that that drive shows as currently used in windows. Usually too big to image to DVD's unless you don't mind spending the time it would take to do,,, and of course the cost of several DVD's. My C drive is small compared to most peoples on win7 and shows 60gb used .. divided by about 4.7gb per DVD.. thats a lot of DVD's and lots of time sitting there changing those disks. fwiw Paid about $11 delivered from newegg for a usb hard drive enclosure and stuck an old laptop hard drive in it & use that here to save system images to weekly. Think DVD-R's cost me about $0.40 each in a pack of 50 including tax from Office Depot.
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bpgreen
Original Author
13 years ago
Two of these products make exact copies of a drive (called an image). They're generally used to do a full backup so that if you have a big problem (hard drive crash, data loss due to unforeseen circumstances, etc) you can just copy it back and be up and running, with no need to reinstall your OS, all the drivers and updates, all your programs, then all your data. You just put the new drive in, boot with a recovery CD (or DVD) and run the restore process. There are usually a few options for you, especially if you are going from a smaller drive to a larger one (you can usually let the program resize the partition(s) automatically, for example).

The one Ravencajun linked lets you treat the image as if it were a hard drive, so you could access individual files on it using Windows explorer. I haven't used it, so I can't verify that, but that's what the description says (that's what they mean when they say mount the image files as virtual drives). The Paragon software lets you restore individual files and folders, but it restores them to the same location where they were before.

The VM link I provided lets you make a copy of your drive as a virtual machine. Windows 7 professional has Virtual machine support built in (none of the home versions do). VMWare has a free player for VMWare virtual machines.

So let's say you're upgrading to a new machine but still want to use some programs on your old machine. You could download the vmware player and install it on the new machine. Then create a virtual machine of the old PC and run it in the new PC. Note that it's running as if it is a separate machine, so you need virus protection for it even if the new machine has its own virus protection.

I'm dong something like that now with a work computer because one client has software that won't run on Windows 7 but is required to access their network. So I installed an XP virtual machine and installed their software in the XP virtual machine. As a side benefit, I had a scanner that wasn't playing well with Windows 7, but it works fine in the XP VM.
ravencajun Zone 8b TX
13 years ago
Jane had you used one of these imaging programs on your pc before you made the big boo boo you could have easily used the drive image to simply restore your entire pc to the state it was when you created the image, including windows and all programs etc, it takes a picture of the drive basically. But in your current state no since you do not have an image to use to restore from it would not help.

however I would sure use one from now on to image all of your hard drives so should you ever have another opps moment you can easily recover.

Windows 7 has a type of imaging feature built in.
jane__ny
13 years ago
Thanks for the explanation. Yes, too late for this one, but would like to use that for my other office computer. Thank goodness, I didn't fool with that.

Hard getting my mind around all this stuff.

Jane

Free Backup/Recovery, VM and more

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ravencajun Zone 8b TX

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Free Backup/Recovery, VM and more

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ravencajun Zone 8b TX

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bpgreenOriginal Author

ravencajun Zone 8b TX

jane__ny

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