My understanding is that full system backups on Windows requires the tool to create VSS snapshots and back up from the snapshot. Any tool that just copies files

My understanding is that full system backups on Windows requires the tool to create VSS snapshots and back up from the snapshot. Any tool that just copies files on the disk won't work. I use Veeam Agent for this purpose (free, but not open source). It can do full system backups and supports both restoring to the same hardware and new hardware. Restores are done via a bootable WinPE-based image that the tool creates. One cool thing about it I haven't seen in other backup software is that incremental backups work via a driver that tracks which disk blocks are changed as the system is running. It avoids the need to rescan the disk to detect what has been changed (though it will still do that if the filesystem is modified outside of Windows, eg. if dual booting). The biggest downside is Veeam's website. It's pretty "enterprisey" and they want you to register to be able to download. I install via the Chocolatey package manager to avoid this. Chocolatey's package source has a direct link to the official installer [0]. There are no ads, nagging, nor upselling in the software itself. I have not seen it making any network connections outside of connecting to my backup target host and the auto-updates server. I've been looking for open source alternative with a similar feature set, but haven't had too much luck. There's Bacula, but that seems to very much be designed for an enterprise use case. [0] https://github.com/sbaerlocher/chocolatey.veeam-agent/blob/master/package/tools/chocolateyinstall.ps1 https://github.com/sbaerlocher/chocolatey.veeam-agent/blob/m...