Best free Windows 7 backup alternative?

[blizeH]

Hi,

 

I'm having some problems with Windows backup so I'm looking for alternatives.

 

Ideally I want to backup my entire C, D and E drives (total of around 1.5TB) onto my F drive (3TB) along with a virtual machine snapshot of my C drive so I can completely restore everything if necessary.

 

I'm currently using synctoy which works fine for the full backups, but won't create a virtual machine file, and it also won't run automatically on a schedule.

 

My girlfriend has Time Machine on her Mac too which looks perfect, so something similar to that would be great too. Thanks :)

 

(btw, I already have a paid version of Syncback SE which I'm not a fan of, so I'm cautious about buying any other pieces of software... that's why I'd prefer free)

 

Thanks

[Luc2k]

I'm not sure about the virtual machine part, but give Macrium Reflect a shot.

[gohpep]

I'm not sure the virtual machine part, but give Macrium Reflect a shot.

I second that.

Free edition of Macrium is available here: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx.

But I would also recommend Comodo Backup. Note that the online backup is not required, and it supports virtual drive compression.

 

And about your Windows Backup problem, it seems like you need to either delete your older snapshots, or make sure your target has enough space for your backup and 12.5% of the target space.

 

If that doesn't work, try running your backup in Safe Mode (restart your computer, and right after the BIOS, spam F8, and select Safe Mode)

 

If that doesn't work, try running a check disk on your backup drive. Use the following command in an elevated command prompt:

 

chkdsk z: /X /B

 

Where z: is the drive you want to check. If your drive is not NTFS, do:

 

chkdsk z: /R /X

 

The I/O error might also be an error of a dying backup drive, so you might want to replace it.

[blizeH]

Thank you so much for the replies guys, I'm going to try the steps mentioned by mastercoms to try to get Windows backup if possible - I already have so much stuff running on my machine if I can get an integrated backup solution that would be perfect. Failing that, I'll give Macrium Reflect a try :)

 

Thanks again

[simonlang]

i would have a look at http://redobackup.org

[monkeylove]

I just maintained three Win 7 machines a few hours ago and looked at what's available online.

 

To anyone who's still using Win 7, for now the best is EaseUS ToDo Backup. The rest have one or more features missing, such as incremental backups, cleaning up old backups, etc.

 

 

[ThaCrip]

@monkeylove

 

You realize this is a old thread right?

 

but anyways, to comment on your stuff... personally i think CloneZilla (i.e. http://clonezilla.org/ ) is the best for general imaging and restoration of hard drives and it's free. it even allows you to store the images through Samba shares which is nice as i used this on my older PC's storing a image onto my main computers hard drives (in the advanced options you can select from different compression methods to if you want). but with that said, i suspect CloneZilla, while not difficult to use, is not as 'easy' as some other things (as it's interface is not as fancy etc) but it's my 'go to' general imaging software as it runs from a bootable USB or CD/DVD.

 

because in older version of CloneZilla you did not have a selectable version of which Samba version you wanted to use which since those tended to use Samba v1, it would not work on a Windows 10 PC since they disabled Samba 1 connections because of security issues etc. but with recent versions of CloneZilla you can select Samba v1 or v2 or v2.1 or v3. i tried v2.1 and v3 and they work fine connecting to a Windows 10 PC. but apparently with older CloneZilla versions you can still connect using Samba v2 or newer but it requires commands as i recently got help with it over on their forums here (which worked perfectly)... https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/discussion/Clonezilla_live/thread/b075d232/

 

SIDE NOTE: since you mentioned 'Windows 7', you can still upgrade those to Windows 10 for free for about 2-3 more days... https://www.neowin.net/news/psa-free-windows-10-upgrade-for-assistive-technology-users-ends-sunday