Backup & Recovery software

Which software are people recommending these days for backup & recovery? For years I used Paragon's Drive Backup but when I bought a new PC, I wasn't sure if it'd cope any more with my GPT partitioning scheme. And it was old anyway - so I updated to Paragon's latest product (Hard Disk Manager). But I must admit I've been hugely disappointed with its limitations.

For example, I can't even name the backup archives (it generates an automatic name now, based on the date & time). The previous software would let me give archives a meaningful name - and even add comments to remind me if I'd created them for some special reason. All of that's gone now.

Worst of all... the latest Paragon product contains a feature for checking the integrity of its generated archives - but I reckon around 20% of them fail its own integrity checker!! (which means it subsequently won't allow me to restore anything).

So time to start looking somewhere else...:cry:

Windows 7 System Image - part of the OS, so it's free! It creates a complete image of the specified logical drive(s) and the image files can be mounted as a 'virtual drive' (VHD) in Disk Management enabling individual files/folders etc to be recovered if a complete drive restore is not required (using Microsoft's recovery DVD/USB). Not much help though with management of the files. All you can specify is the drive on which the image file is created. But once created, they can be renamed/moved etc. In Windows 10 it's called Backup and Restore (Windows 7) in the Control Panel. For Windows 7 it's just Backup and Restore.

Hmmm... I just tried that on Windows 10 but it'd only allow me to create backups from an NTFS formatted drive and it only lets me save them onto an NTFS drive (FAT32 volumes don't seem to be supported at all - unless I'm missing something...)


9Edit...] I just tried a test backup with NTFS volumes. It seemed to create the archive okay - but it also wouldn't let me choose an archive name or add a comment. And (even worse) I then tried a 2nd backup and it simply over-wrote the first one (i.e. the 2nd time, it wouldn't let me choose to backup some different files or back them up to some different destination :cry: )

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I just tried a test backup with NTFS volumes. It seemed to create the archive okay - but it also wouldn't let me choose an archive name or add a comment. And (even worse) I then tried a 2nd backup and it simply over-wrote the first one (i.e. the 2nd time, it wouldn't let me choose to backup some different files or back them up to some different destination

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Yes. As I mentioned, you have to manage the files yourself (and move them to a different location after its finished)! But its free :thumb: and the drive restore works and the ability to mount as a VHD to access individual files/folders is a plus.

Don't have any FAT32 volumes so can't say - they're all NTFS including the external one(s) used for the system image.

PS you can save the image to a network location.

Do a bing or google search for "backup windows 10 to the cloud."

Below mentioned are some of the best backup & recovery softwares :-

Cyber Backup
Synology Active Backup
Backblaze
Carbonite
Novabackup

Hope this information is helpful to you