| For making frequent backups without shutting down Windows, nothing I've tried compares to ShadowProtect Desktop [1]. It makes a complete incremental backup of my C: drive every 15 minutes. Those backups often take only a few seconds, and they don't interrupt my work at all. I used Acronis before that and it worked fine, but the incremental backups took many minutes with a lot of disk activity - even if I'd only touched a few files. Running a backup every 15 minutes wouldn't be in the cards. So I'd run an incremental manually when I felt worried enough to do so - if I remembered to do it! It's a real stress-reducer to know that everything is backed up every 15 minutes and I can read files or restore the system from any of those 15-minute checkpoints. ShadowProtect does this by making sector-by-sector backups with a limited amount of filesystem knowledge: it skips free space and pagefile.sys/hiberfil.sys, and that's about it. It has a driver that keeps track of disk writes while Windows is running, so it doesn't have to scan the disk or filesystem for changes. If that tracking data becomes invalid (e.g. because of a bluescreen or forced power-off) it falls back to a full disk scan for the next incremental backup. It still makes the same small incremental that it would have made otherwise, it just takes longer - about as long as a full backup. Because the backup is sector-by-sector, if you change just part of a large file, only the changed sectors need to be backed up. If you move or rename a large file, it takes hardly any time at all to back it up, because it only has to back up the filesystem metadata and not the file data itself. You can mount a backup volume and open the files in any Windows app, or you can use their restore CD to do a bare metal restore, including a hardware independent restore. Of course other backup programs have those features too, they just don't have the crazy fast incrementals. I've used the full restore many times and only had a problem once, when I migrated a Windows 8 installation from a ThinkPad X220 Tablet to a ThinkPad W520. It wouldn't boot at first, but I ran the automatic repair from the Windows 8 DVD and that fixed it right up. One limitation with ShadowProtect is that you can't do a restore onto a hard drive smaller than the original one, only the same or larger. This is a consequence of the backup image being a full disk image and not a set of files. (You can of course mount a backup image on a running system and copy files from it regardless of disk or partition size.) Also, it doesn't provide disk cloning, only image backup and restore. Here there are more good options; my favorite right now is Drive Copy 12 Professional from Paragon Software [2]. (After you make their CD and boot it, it launches a simplified wizard environment; check the bottom of the screen for the "advanced launcher" where all the good options are.) [1] http://www.shadowprotect.com/ [2] http://www.paragon-software.com/home/dc-professional/ |