Windows 10: View Poll Results: What backup / imaging software you use?

Okay here's my latest story:

Someone asked me to "fix" their flash drives. Their data was disappearing. I assumed it was a case of putting too much data on the drives, causing them to "explode". I plugged the first flash drive into a spare system of mine which was connected to my home network, and not my guest network, and only had Defender running on it. Caught off guard, I found a series of viruses and network-spreading worms, including Ramnit, Dridex and various Gamarue.(x), which proceeded to infect my system and another computer which was online at the time. In case you're interested, Ramnit, in particular, makes so many modifications to so many system files, that it is impossible to clean out of an OS.

Long story short, after cleaning the flash drives and recovering the data, I was able to simply restore images to my two machines, and was back in business within a few hours. Without Macrium, it would have been a disaster.

 

*Smile

Can we agree that we change the rules one last time: Each participant only participates with one ticket, regardless of how many posts he / she might have posted in this thread? Equal chance to win for every member.

 

Sounds good to me Kari. *Smile

 

I hope this is not off topic but this poll makes interesting reading.

Macrium is way out front in popularity of course, but in part that could be attributed to the fact it is well recommended here, but that would not wholly account for such a massive lead. IMO its reputation is really well justified.

What I really find interesting is that Acronis which was once the "king" has been relegated to an also ran. I attribute this mainly to the fact, it offers little over Macrium (compared to even free version), and is expensive.

AEOMI seems to be getting more popular, but still a long way to go.

Easeus was popular some years ago, but (in my experience) it is slow but to be fair I always found it reliable.

What is really interesting is that on;y one person here voted for windows own tool which if I was MS, I would find rather embarrassing. Hardly surprising, though as it has not been significantly developed for years.

Of course, it is always considered a good plan to image backup with more than one tool, and I advise people to do that but tbh I never even follow my own advice as Macrium has never let me down. I do not even bother with verification!

Interestingly, today I experienced a failure with a corrupt macrium image but it turned out the corruption was caused when i copied the image from one drive to another - when I checked the original image, it was fine.

 

OK geeks, the final version of rules, first post updated:

My sincere apologies for doing what I do best, screwing up even the simplest things. Competition, the drawing is now fair and transparent: one ticket per members, staff & team excluded.


I've also added this to the end of post #1:

List of participating members with their ticket numbers

Please notice list is sorted alphabetically to make it easier to detect possible double entries. List will be updated a few times a day, stay calm if your entry is not shown immediately after posting *Smile

 

ticket 13 for me *Sad

 

Well, even though I am using Acronis for years now and I heard about Macrium Reflect here for the first time, I'd give it a try. I am still using Acronis TI 2011 since it has never failed me (the 2014 Version is a complete different story).
Other than that I wish I'd be a winner for once at least (never won anything in my life)...

 

Yeah the 2014 version was a disaster!

 

2016 wasn't much better ....even after the bug fixes.

 

@Kari How about adding "Need not be present to win"? (it is canning season...)

 

That's obvious. I just hope there are enough active members to participate in TF Live Chat to witness that drawing will be fair. Winners will be announced in this thread and TF Live Chat thread straight after the drawing.

 

Windows XP had a good Backup tool for its day. But then I upgraded to Windows 8, and wasn't impressed to find that my backups couldn't be read, even though Windows XP->8 was a recommended upgrade route.

Then the 'Windows 7 Backup and Restore' got deleted in Windows 8.1. You could still do a System Image but not a more specific Backup.

Then the 'Windows 7 Backup and Restore' tool reappeared again in Windows 10, but, given its history, for how long?

Also I dislike the way this tool insists on making backups in the root folder of a drive.

So given Microsoft's history with backup tools, I have pretty much abandoned their Backup.

 

Incidentally is there a reason why File History doesn't even get a mention in the poll?

 

Because forum software allows 10 choices in a poll.

 

Here's another story. I had a someone's Dell W8 machine to upgrade to W10. It had gone through the W8>W8.1 upgrade, and now W10. There were something like half a dozen partitions by the time all was said and done. So, after upgrading to W10, I imaged the C partition, clean installed W10, then in Macrium Restore mode, I dragged the C partition from the image back onto the system drive, and voil ! All the programs and data were back, and all the useless partitions were gone (including the Dell recovery partition). *Smile