Windows 10: For many years, my computers' "backup" system would program to routinely backup to my...

For many years, my computers' "backup" system would program to routinely backup to my masive EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE. Since int he past few months, Microsoft has eliminated that availabilty and only option is to pay them over $10 every month to Back Up to their CLOUD. CRAZY as I see that their CLOUD gives them incredible earnings for CLOUD Storage. I have felt that prvious feature for my external hard drive was part of what I paid for when I purchased software initially!!!

:)

 

Backup utility

Cobian backup will do file backups locally or to ftp, with or without encryption and compression. However it doesn't do image backups, which is really what you need if want to fully restore your system.

I've used the W7 back up program and Acronis a few times to restore a system and both work great. With Acronis though, you need to burn the recovery cd they suggest FOR EACH and EVERY machine you use it on.

One problem with W7 backup is that seems to break easily. On one machine I did an upgrade re-install and the backup utility doesn't work. No luck in trouble shooting it either. So I now rely on Acronis exclusively for image backups. But I use Cobian for file backups to ftp.

 

Free hard drive backup/restore program?

I am looking for a free (freeware) program that will back up and restore a hard drive. I'm looking to clone a few external hard drives. If the program will backup the used space instead of the whole drive this will be awesome! Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Using network hard drive for backup

It depends what sort of backup you want to do. If you're happy just backing up regular files, then there are a bazillion (really, that many!) different bits of freeware to do that. There is a good list here:

Download Back Up Tools for Windows - MajorGeeks

and pretty much all of them can do network backups. Some even have fancy options like encryption. Really, the most useful thing is just being able to schedule them and know they ran OK.

You may also want to make a system image backup too, and you'll find that software in the very same list.

I don't have Windows 8 as yet, so I'm afraid I can't suggest any for that platform. Personally, I use Clonezilla for image backups.