Windows 10: Backup of System drive.

I hope this is the right forum for this question which is to do with backing up Windows 10.

I have recently purchased a new laptop which came with Windows 8 and a 1TB hard drive which I partitioned into two - one for the OS (Drive C) and the other for data (Drive F). The reason for this was because I have 2 external drives which are both 500GB and the partitioning made backup easier.

I upgraded the OS to windows 10 as a 'clean install'.

Now I am looking at how to backup the OS.

In the past I used a product called Casper
The reason I used this is because once the initial 'clone' of the C: partition was done, it was a quick job to update it periodically using a feature (they call Smartclone) which only updated certain system files and any changed files on the drive.
I have an external drive which I use to backup the data from F:

A bootable USB drive with Casper on it allows me to boot to the USB, load Casper and then copy the Backup onto a new C: drive should anything go wrong and/or if I needed to change the hard drive,
BUT ALSO
the facility where I could just take the backup drive and use it as a replacement for the main OS drive and it will only be out of date by the amount of time since I did the last 'Smartclone'

Simple - until now.

Within Casper the options only offer the facility to copy the whole hard drive (both partitions) or one partition at a time.

- I do not want to copy the whole drive each time because that will take up a whole 1TB drive unnecessarily. I guess I could back up the Windows OS, the EFI Partition and recovery partitions as 3 seperate actions (I guess the later 2 should never need to be backed up subsequent to the intial backup).


But I have 2 problems:

1. Casper does not see the EFI and recovery partitions on any disc other than the OS one.
2. It appears that Windows does not allow the creation of these 2 partitions except on a 'format' during a clean install.

Because of these problems it does seem that this backup software is not as simple as it used to be.

Can anyone suggest any alternative method to achieve what I need - ie a quick and easy way to keep a copy of the Win 10 OS on an external drive that is a plug and play replacement.

:)

 

How does one use a new backup drive and what are the ramifications?

How does one use a new backup drive in Windows 10 and what are the ramifications for the existing backup drive? I want to use a new backup drive. Can I connect the new backup drive and create a new backup for the user libraries and system image? Does
using a new drive prevent me from using the system image from the old backup drive? I know a ID file exists on the current backup drive.

 

My Bios not support UEFI secure boot, what can I do to install Windows 10 from Windows 7 64 bit!

If I may jump in here for just one comment. You had your backup drive as a partition on the same drive as the system. That is ineffective. If the physical drive fails you not only lose the system but your backups as well. The whole idea of a backup
is to avoid just that. Always back up to a removable drive that you can use to restore the system to a replacement system drive should the original system drive fail. A 1TB external usb 3.0 drive is less than $100 but worth its weight in gold.

 

And that is the only disk that should have those partitions..

We all seem very happy with using Macrium Reflect > Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free

 

Thanks Khyi.

I will gave a look at Macrium, but in the meantime can you explain why you say that the EFI and recovery partitions should only be on OS one.

If I use Casper as it was originally intended to be used, I would clone the C: drive to a backup drive but if I then used the backup to replace the original OS disc, there would be no EFI or Recovery partitions - would this not affect the operation of the copy?

Incidentally -
When I tried to confirm if the backup was working or not, when windows was booting it kept reporting that there were files missing and could not boot.

 

I do not know "Casper" but you have to Clone the disk -
C: is just a partition on the disk...
EFI and Recovery Partitions are required system partitions to make C: usable

With Macrium you would backup the OS Disk..
And keep your DATA on a second Disk

 

Thanks Khyi.

It appears that this is the same with Casper now - and having 2 separate hard drives for OS and Data is not what I wanted to do - but looks like I will now have to.

The reason I used 2 partitions is because with Casper before the introduction of EFI/Recovery partitions, I could choose to backup the partition with the OS on it, then using their SmartBackup facility when I ran any further backups on the OS disc it only copied the changed files from the OS disc to the backup disc and it was a lot faster than doing whole backups each time.

I will have to try a whole disc backup and see how much longer it takes to then update a whole disc backup as opposed to just the one partition and compare the timings.

 

It shouldn't take much longer since all modern backup programs support the concept of incremental and or differential backups meaning the first backup is a full backup. Every succeeding backup is either incremental (containing only the changes since the last backup) or differential (containing only the difference to the initial full backup).