Before Reinstall ... Windows Desktop Backup
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Occasionally (such as is the case today) I come across a machine that I need to wipe and reinstall that is out of the realm of my domain. A friend, relative, whatever. (I know this isn't something a lot of you do, but I do.)
I like to take an image of it, just in case the user forgets where they have stored their data.
I was wondering what everyone uses for this kind of backup. Obviously in a work setting you'd probably just re-image it. I am talking more for the special cases where that is not an option.
Since these are personal machines, I've always used DriveImageXML (https://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm) but I thought I'd throw it out to the ML community to see what other open source/free programs people might be using.
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I've had good luck doing it with Veeam Endpoint Recovery Free. it works great.
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@dafyre said:
I've had good luck doing it with Veeam Endpoint Recovery Free. it works great.
Did you find any speed issues with it?
It seemed to run slowly for me, but I did not test it up against other products.
I am going to give it another try in this machine I have here.
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@BRRABill said:
@dafyre said:
I've had good luck doing it with Veeam Endpoint Recovery Free. it works great.
Did you find any speed issues with it?
It seemed to run slowly for me, but I did not test it up against other products.
I am going to give it another try in this machine I have here.
It's not the fastest thing in the world for imaging, but it does work... Clonezilla also seems to be great if you are going to just image from
to a USB drive. -
@dafyre said:
It's not the fastest thing in the world for imaging, but it does work... Clonezilla also seems to be great if you are going to just image from
to a USB drive.I tried it on my own laptop when I wiped and reinstalled last month.
It took so long I gave up on it.
I thought maybe it was just me.
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@dafyre said:
I've had good luck doing it with Veeam Endpoint Recovery Free. it works great.
When I tested that, I could never get a disk image to restore correctly. Macrium Reflect Free edition was the fastest and most reliable in my tests, both for backup and restoration, whole disk imaging.
But let's face it, if the software can't successfully restore the image, it's not worth a shit.
(I have also used Acronis, DriveImage XML, and Clonezilla in the past, all great success!)
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Just using dd works, too.
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@RojoLoco said:
But let's face it, if the software can't successfully restore the image, it's not worth a shit.
Considering that I couldn't even get the BACKUP/IMAGE to take, I never even got a chance for it to fail there.
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@BRRABill said:
dd?
This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)
or maybe this: https://www.dunkindonuts.com/dunkindonuts/en.html
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Just using dd works, too.
dd?
The standard under the hood imaging tool. It's a native UNIX command but available for every platform. It's just a directly block pipe. Does nothing fancy and always works.
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@aaronstuder said:
or maybe this: https://www.dunkindonuts.com/dunkindonuts/en.html
That's what I figured. I actually just got back from there with a coffee. Thanks @scottalanmiller !
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@BRRABill said:
@aaronstuder said:
or maybe this: https://www.dunkindonuts.com/dunkindonuts/en.html
That's what I figured. I actually just got back from there with a coffee. Thanks @scottalanmiller !
I'm so sorry.
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I've been using Clonezilla for over 10 years. it's my go to for this type of thing.
If you had performance issues using it, I'd look at your interfaces to see if there was a problem there.
Normally I push my images to a SMB share, it's also where I restore images from. a 20 GB image takes under 10 mins to restore, probably closer to 5 min on a 1 Gb network.
If you were backing up to a USB 2.0 attached (or god forbid a 1.1) that would be why it was so slow.
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Microsoft P2V converter called Disk2VHD. Rips it super quick, does it while logged in to windows, dumps it into a (kind of) convenient format (VHD, mountable in disk management)
100% free, does not need to be installed, application is under 1mb, requires no prep
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
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@MattSpeller said:
Microsoft P2V converter called Disk2VHD. Rips it super quick, does it while logged in to windows, dumps it into a (kind of) convenient format (VHD, mountable in disk management)
100% free, does not need to be installed, application is under 1mb
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
Can you restore that to bare metal?
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@Dashrender said:
@MattSpeller said:
Microsoft P2V converter called Disk2VHD. Rips it super quick, does it while logged in to windows, dumps it into a (kind of) convenient format (VHD, mountable in disk management)
100% free, does not need to be installed, application is under 1mb
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
Can you restore that to bare metal?
I've never wanted to, I have no idea. Probably? It'd be messy.
Edit: why not just fire it up as a vm?
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@Dashrender said:
If you were backing up to a USB 2.0 attached (or god forbid a 1.1) that would be why it was so slow.
It was USB 2.0, but so much slower than other products.
Plus now that I have heard other are having restore issues ... maybe I'll just stick to other stuff.
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@MattSpeller said:
Microsoft P2V converter called Disk2VHD. Rips it super quick, does it while logged in to windows, dumps it into a (kind of) convenient format (VHD, mountable in disk management)
100% free, does not need to be installed, application is under 1mb, requires no prep
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
That's a great idea.
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@MattSpeller said:
I've never wanted to, I have no idea. Probably? It'd be messy.
Edit: why not just fire it up as a vm?
I guess the fear would be ... what if you needed to put the system back exactly as you found it?
Unlikely since you are trying to wipe and restore. But something to consider.
Considering you have the data, though, I'm not sure that is such a big issue.
