Windows 10: Simple Back Up

The sure way to back up the Windows 10 system and its settings is to make a system image, with Macrium for preference.

My backup is just of my User folder, including the Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music and Videos folders. On restoring a system image (which may be up to a month old in my case) I can then update my user folder with the latest versions of my personal files.

 

AOMEI backupper standard, its free..

not only disk image/partition image, it support file/folder backup too.

it has problem with bootable iso/disk creator , to boot on UEFI, you should copy boot file from windows dvd/iso source, i mean EFI > boot > efi file

 

Not idea what EFI or UEFI is!

 

Here's some reading on it. It pertains to BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). It's what operating system boot from. It has gotten to be quite sophisticated.

Welcome to Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Forum | Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Forum

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface - Wikipedia

 

Macrium is very easy to use, just one click or via an automatic BU set within Macrium.

I found it not so easy to set up. The various menus seem to be all over the place and difficult to find when wanted. I had to make notes of how to reach a menu. Also, at first I found actually using the concept of "Keep"ing several backups difficult to set up to do what I wanted. Basically, if you set up a schedule so that a backup is made at a certain time on a certain day or days, or manually, if you set Keep to, say, 3 backups, you will always have three: the most recent, the next most recent and the one before that. Every time a new BU is made, that third one will be deleted. I have never used differentials or incremental backups. I found Macrium excellent when set up.

If your C drive is on an SSD (along with programs) Macrium takes only 15 minutes (at 5:15 pm every day) to make my backups in the background without noticeably slowing the computer. It can do this even when the comp. continues to sleep. I use FreeFileSync to make backups of my internal HD which holds Documents, Pictures etc. FFS backups only the changes since the last backup so is extremely quick. On the other hand, Macrium's backups are always full images of a drive and this would takes a long time for my internal HD which holds 650 GB of data, 95% or more of which never changes and therefore never needs to be re-backed up.

 

You obviously misunderstand things.

On one hand you say Reflects images are always full backups and then you say you do not use differential backups.

You talk about other tools only backing up changes. That is precisely what differential backups are for ie only backup changes since last full backup. They are usually tiny compared with full backup.

 

I backup changes by making bimonthly or more often full image backups of my OS and Data partitions.