Back up everything
Protect your entire Windows installation – including apps and settings – from harm with a full drive image.
YOUR DATA IS now backed up, ensuring your precious files and memories are protected. But what about the rest of your computer? What if you’ve inadvertently missed a critical folder or file? And what about Windows itself, along with all your applications and carefully crafted program settings? If Windows falls over, you could lose these, never mind the hours required to bring everything back up to speed. The solution lies in taking what’s known as a ‘drive image’.
As the name implies, a drive image is a complete copy of one or more drives or drive partitions on your PC. The next time you run into problems – after a botched Windows Update, say – you can simply roll your computer back to its previous self within minutes, with nothing lost but the changes made since the last drive image was taken.
If you currently protect your PC in this way using Macrium Reflect Free ( www.macrium.
com/reflectfree), there’s only one reason to consider switching to Paragon Backup and Recovery Free ( www.paragon-software.com/
free/br-free/): the latter’s support for incremental drive images. Incremental changes take up less space than differential ones, so this would make it more practical to back up daily rather than a weekly.
TIME TO PARTITION?
One of the major drawbacks of a drive image is the fact that you roll your entire system back when you restore from your backup – and that includes all the files on the drive, including your data files. This means if you had to restore a backup from a week ago, all the changes you made in the intervening period would be lost unless you then went through the rigmarole (explained over the page) of restoring the latest data backup after restoring your drive image.
One way to mitigate this problem is to partition a drive in two. This enables you to move your data to the secondary partition,
“One of the major drawbacks of a drive image is the fact that you roll your entire system back.”
separating it from Windows. That way, when you roll back your Windows partition your data remains untouched. Our go-to tool for partitioning is AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition (download it for free from
www.disk-partition.com). After launching for the first time make sure you first click Make Bootable Media under Wizards to create a rescue disc, just in case something goes wrong.
Next, open File Explorer and select This PC. Make a note of how much free space is currently on drive C. Now browse to C:\Users, right-click your user folder and choose Properties, if you haven’t already done so, to ascertain its current size. If the folder is larger than the amount of free space left on drive C, you’ll need to temporarily move its contents to another drive. Once done, follow the step-by-step guide below.
One final step: it’s not enough to move your folders to your newly-created data partition, you need to let Windows know where they’ve gone to, too. Open File Explorer, then right-click each of your personal folders (Documents, Downloads and so on) in turn, choosing Properties, then the Location tab and clicking Move to point them towards folders on your data partition. When prompted, opt to move your existing files across. Don’t forget to move your cloud backup folder, too, if necessary.
TAKE YOUR BACKUP
Once you have partitioned your drive – or skipped this step if you’re happy to keep your data and Windows on the same drive – it’s time to set up your image. Open Paragon Backup and Recovery Free as outlined on the previaous page. Click the ‘+’ button at the top next to My
Backups. Click ‘Backup Source’ and select Entire Computer if you’re backing up a single drive or ‘Disk/Volumes’ if you’ve partitioned your drive drive. In the case of the latter, identify the drive with Windows on it and click ‘Local Disk (C:)’ – you’ll notice that Paragon automatically selects the small partitions to the left to ensure you also back up the all-important boot partitions, too. Click ‘OK’.
The rest of the process follows the same path as backing up individual files as outlined in the previous section: choose your destination, pick a schedule – once a day should be sufficient – and select the incremental option under ‘Backup strategy’.
We’d advise creating a chain whereby a full backup is created weekly, with six incremental backups in-between. You can then choose whether to keep all your backups until space runs out or limit them to a specific number – remember each backup chain equates to a week’s worth of backups, so there’s probably no reason to keep more than one or two. Once that’s done, click ‘Back up now’ and wait for your first drive backup to complete; subsequent backups will take place in the background.