Are there any good open source alternatives to fully backup Windows 11? I have 4x 2TB SSDs just waiting to be put to work.
There is a couple of good free non-OSS options for full-machine backups. One is Veeam's End Point Agent. Dead simple, comes from a good source. A more elaborate one is Macrium Reflect, which has an older Free version, still perfectly fine.
* https://vorta.borgbase.com/install/windows/
just my 0.02€
If you've got physical hard drives to back up to, and you want to be able to use those hard drives on Windows, Mac, and Linux:
It would seem a good file system for cross compatibility is exFAT.
While it doesn't have all the features of other file systems, it seems to work on almost everything without making too many compromises.
Something to consider if your main computer dies and you need to restore from a backup using a different OS!
I hope this helps someone. :)
ExFAT is fine, but NTFS is [mostly] bulletproof and has never burned me, so I prefer it.
Even Mac can also mount NTFS, can't remember if it's read-only but it'll be good enough for recovery purposes.
Here’s an old blog post from Scott Hanselman on how to set it up. It pretty much works the same now.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/windows-8-step-0-turn-on-cont...
A backup should allow you to recover from total system failure.
If your hard drive suddenly fails then neither of the options you mentioned would help.
https://www.ionos.com/digitalguide/server/tools/robocopy-bac...
https://caughtinpixels.com/how-to-create-a-backup-script-usi...
true. But you select what is tracked. My approach is to make a system image using the built in functionality. I use file history for the important stuff that does need to be backed up - code, documents, etc. - every 10min. Make sure that you cover everything. Nowadays, a lot of things are being put into ~\AppData.
You also have OneDrive. I don't like it because I've had it cause problems using multiple computers when you don't want everything in sync. Apple and Microsoft seem determined to get you subscribing to their online stores by having unrealistically low limits. Don't trust anything in the cloud anyway.
If I have a crash that trashes everything I think it's easier to do a clean install, install the software applications that you need, and then recover from file history.
I've not had the misfortune of a total crash as yet. I do have multiple SSDs with separate OS instances side by side, core live data on yet another SSD so I think I'm good. That said, I've still have to use the file history to restore/recover things. Always because I did something that messed up.
Use basically the same approach on macos. Without the multiple drivers though.
I do it manually using the built-in Windows 11 tools.
Boot to the Windows Startup Media, go to Command Line, at the "DOS" prompt you will be at a ramdrive X:. Ready to accept your commands.
Your regular Windows partition will (almost always) still be C: (which you can check) but since you are not actually booted to that partition, your entire Windows installation, whatever you have on C: at the time, is just sitting there idle, nothing more than a bunch of dormant files & folders which you can now back up comprehensively without any of them being in use at the time.
Use the DISM /Capture-Image command to create a .WIM file from your entire C: volume and store it on a device of your choice. The default compression ends up about half the space it takes up normally. It helps if you don't have anything wasting space on C: that you don't really need beforehand, so the comprehensive backup file is not un-necessarily huge.
Most of the time your Boot files are not on your C: volume so they are not backed up in this process.
You should be confident at booting to the startup media, backing up, reformatting, and restoring to the same partition. The Boot files in their hidden partition would be expecting that, and can remain untouched.
From the startup media you restore the saved .WIM file to a waiting partition using the DISM /Apply-Image routine.
Look at the Help for DISM, it is very powerful but don't be confused, it takes very little mastery if all you are going to use it for is backup & restore.
If you restore the backup .WIM file to new drive hardware you would have to partition and format the drive beforehand, and then it would restore to the empty filesystem fine. But in this case Boot files were not already there on the drive from previous use so you would have to freshly create them according to the situation at hand. For this, one of the commands that may be worthwhile to learn about is BCDBOOT and you can get what you want.
This is ideal for transferring to different size partitions or drive hardware, but nothing's perfect and some software is a little deficient even with the native backup, so may occasionally need to be re-licensed after restoration.
The completely comprehensive way is the simplest, and it's a full backup of everything on C:, not just the essential Windows operating system.
Incremental snapshots can then be taken after that using DISM also, you might want to address that once you have well rehearsed the full backup & restore to your satisfaction.
Oh, yeah, I believe Clonezilla is open source, seems to work OK and it can be good if you want to have a whole-disk backup including your boot files.
But generating your own boot files from Windows, the way you want them whenever you need to is way more versatile, and just as easy to learn. Then you don't need Clonezilla.
Plus with Clonezilla you're booting to a Linux starting media in order to access your Windows partition while it's dormant, but DISM is a built-in Windows routine for this exact task.