2 ms·

I guess none of my suggestions will help :) but I sometimes run "Create a system image" from the Windows 7 backup and restore page that is still hanging around.

by rzzzt 6y ago

I guess none of my suggestions will help :) but I sometimes run "Create a system image" from the Windows 7 backup and restore page that is still hanging around. It has an option to save to a network location. I think that even though some pop-up messages tell you that the previous backup will be blown away, it actually is incremental to a certain extent, and the recovery tool in the installer sometimes does list multiple dates to restore from -- although I'm not sure if and how data retention can be controlled. Also disk encryption is removed on restore, and I think the backup is not encrypted at rest either; you need to keep it in an encrypted location to begin with. For file-level backups, I'm using an rsync frontend, QtdSync, but I also had success with Borg running under Msys2's Python interpreter.

EvanAnderson 6y ago
Windows system image backups with "physical" disks backing the storage (either locally-attached disks or via iSCSI) is actually reasonably nice. On later versions of Windows you can encrypt the backup with Bitlocker. Mounting prior backup generations via command line tools isn't too hateful. Bare metal restores of the entire system are very straightforward, too. Using a network location is somewhat less useful. You lose Volume Shadow Copy so it becomes a single generation full-backup-every-time solution. It's still easy to mount and to restore from, but marginally more useless. It would figure that Microsoft announced (last year, I believe) that the feature is no longer being developed.