Full Windows Backup

Greetings,

I would like advice on backing up windows.

Goal: regularly create full system/full disk backup of windows 10.

Ideas:

  1. Use dd if=/dev/sda of=win.img.
    a. This should, I think, preserve windows’ partition structure and all data.
    b. However, would win.img be the size of /dev/sda, or would it be only the size of the used space on /dev/sda?
    c. Thoughts? Does anyone use this method?
    d. Can differential backup be done this way? Perhaps ddd, or d-cubed, for differential data dumb?
  2. Backup partitions and data seperately. Use some tool for storing the partition information (suggestions please). Then use rsync to do differential backups of the data.

I know windows has backup and recovery options. I have tried these. In my experience they are complete garbage, while linux backup solutions always work well for me. However, if you have experience using windows backup tools, please share it.

I use BTRFS on linux, so I have access to the wonder of its snapshots. These are also accessible from the grub menu. SIMPLY AMAZING! So, I also have a very low-percentage-baked idea about using BTRFS for windows. Is this at all possible? Has anyone done anything like this?
My thought was to have windows running in a VM on linux and give it access to a subvolume to use as its C drive. I have no experience with VM’s so this might be a complete fantasy.

Thank you in advance for any advice and experience you can share.

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1 a) Yes it would.

1 b) I would be the size of /dev/sda

1 c) It is a very inefficient method. I would not use it.

1 d) Not with the command itself. There is also no sane way to utilize this command to create a differential update in a way that would be faster than creating a complete image again.

2 ) It saves space to only save user data like documents and so on under Windows because all system files can be omitted. That would also mean you need to reinstall everything manually and copy back the user data. If you use programs that do not create saperate files but maintain a database of some sort themselfs you would need to export files for these programs manually.

You should have a look if restic is something for you. It has a good reputation. From my experience proprietary and paid backup software like Acronis True Image works really well and should be able to do most of what you desire.

I agree that the Windows backup & restore tools are unbelievably bad - the restore operation has never succeeded for me, and has often trashed other data on the drive. I have not used the File History approach, though; it doesn’t fit my need. And I generally agree with what Sapiens had to say.

I have had good success with the free version of AOMEI Backupper Standard, and have successfully restored the system drive several times as a way to replace the boot drive. It does have several weak points:

  • May rearrange the order of partitions on the restored drive (odd…).
  • Regularly tries to upsell to the paid version; a minor nuisance.
  • The UI is unintuitive (to me), as are the terminology & concepts. Not enough to create any risk of data loss, but it takes a while to figure out the fine points. But one can do the basics pretty quickly.

I’m sure there are other good backup & restore tools, some free, but I am satisfied with AOMEI.

System Image and Restore has always worked perfectly for me. I guess your mileage may vary.

I don’t believe that it creates incremental / differential backups. It is always a full copy.

If you don’t mind a ton of bugs and incompatible drivers and software you could try ReactOS which is an open-source Windows clone. It has BTRFS support.

Windows supports VSS, Volume Shadow copy Service. It is usually only usable in the background for System Restore Points and backup software. However if you have Pro or Server versions of Windows (I think?) you can use it yourself. It is like BTRFS or LVM snapshots.

But of course that isn’t a backup.

I personally make a Windows System Image before doing anything risky or about twice a year. I use the File History system to back up my documents to my NAS, and most of those are on Dropbox or Onedrive anyway, if they aren’t already stored on the NAS shared drive.

Is ReactOS even out of pre-beta/alpha?

Edit: Yup its still in alpha:

Please note, that ReactOS is still in alpha and gives no guarantee of stability, safety of your files or working at all.

Could definitely still be cool though

From personal experience for backups and baremetal recovery on both Windows and Linux, I can recommend the free Veeam Agent. Recovered my mom’s laptop after the OG drive went poof and did a P2V conversion restore of a Linux machine into Hyper-V. Although I experienced some weird caviats in terms of baremetal recovery.

When the agent asks you if you want to generate a customized iso, do it or face the consequences later. I’d also keep a generic recovery ISO next to the customized one in case the customized one gives you some issues. Also for Windows recovery, after the machine was fully restored I had to reinstall the realtek audio drivers since it didn’t like them.

Although I gotta say that the file based recovery is also pretty handy.

Thanks for all the advice!

I’ll go ahead and try some of these once I get a place to store full system images. I figure an array of 2 8 TiB HDD’s in raid 1 should do it for me. I realize it’s better to have a backup outside the machine, but I don’t have one of those yet. Maybe that’ll be the next big thing I get.

For moving windows to new (bigger) disk i have used Macrium Reflect. Should also include periodic backup option.
Veeam Agent was working fine but windows update somehow broke it, had to reinstall each time.

I highly recommend Veeam for Windows backups. Very fast and reliable, with features like creation of bootable disc images for very fast full-system restore:

The other highly regarded free Windows option is Macrium:

If you have a Linux backup server, UrBackup might be a good option:

https://www.urbackup.org/

And with the WSL on Win10, borg reportedly works well, though marked “Experimental”:
https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

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Anyone using BTRFS on windows? I have read that it’s possible, but it seems sus.

I wasnt aware Windows could read BTRFS.

I use ntfsclone and gdisk to backup a SSD with Windows installed, which I occasionally dual-boot from (so I can access it directly from Linux, without Windows running).

ntfsclone will do full backups/restores of a NTFS filesystem efficiently (not touching space not allocated by the filesystem):

ntfsclone will efficiently clone (copy, save, backup, restore) or rescue an NTFS filesystem to a sparse file, image, device (partition) or standard output. It works at disk sector level and copies only the used data. Unused disk space becomes zero (cloning to sparse file), encoded with control codes (saving in special image format), left un‐ changed (cloning to a disk/partition) or filled with zeros (cloning to standard output).

Examples from the man-page:

Save an NTFS to a file in the special image format:
ntfsclone --save-image --output backup.img /dev/hda1

Restore an NTFS from a special image file to its original partition:
ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/hda1 backup.img

If you use - as the output file, you can compress it and/or stream it over ssh to a remote machine, e.g.: ntfsclone --save-image --output - /dev/sda1 | zstd -1 | pv | ssh backupbox "cat > windows.ntfs.zstd"

However, it doesn’t handle incremental backups.

sgdisk can be used to backup/restore a GPT partition table: sgdisk /dev/sda --backup=sda.backup