What options should i choose for my needs?
Hi, I want to make an exact backup of my C: drive/system drive with all apps, settings and files as of the point when I make the backup/clone. I have a few programs which are installed on my C: drive, but have file directories on my other drives...mainly my music software. So need to have all of those entries to be recalled too, whenever I make a restore.
I also would also love to be able restore my drive from a USB, if my system gets corrupted and I'm unable to access windows.
I'm a bit confused as to what option to choose and whether or not I need to buy the full version to do this. What options do I need to pick to do make a perfect backup of my C: drive?
Thanks in advance and thanks for this amazing piece of software!
Comments
You can use a USB drive to store your backup image. A USB thumb drive has limitations and would have to be very large (larger than your image size) and probably formated NTFS and not FAT32. You would make your emergency boot media on a USB thumb drive and boot from that to recover your C drive.
For your C drive, you could do a SYSTEM backup which would only image those partitions necessary to boot into Windows and have a functioning OS which would also contain all files, programs, etc that are on your C partition. A DISK backup would image all partitions on that drive (like if you have a D or E partition ON that same drive). For the other drives where you want to backup what I assume are FOLDERS with your music, you can do a FILE or FOLDER backup, again, using an external USB drive as the backup storage location. You could do a restore of those folders from within the OS if those folders are on another drive. You cannot do both backups with only 1 back up set if you want a drive backup and also a folder backup. You would need to run 2 tasks. But that shouldn't be a problem. Just plug in your USB drive and manually run the backups one at a time. Then you can remove the USB drive and store it in a safe place until you want to do a restore or until you want to do another backup image.
A backup image is used to "restore" a good snapshot of your working drive to a new drive in case of drive failure or virus, etc. If the image is on an external USB drive, you remove the bad drive and put a new one in in it's place. You boot via the USB rescue media, which loads a copy of Aomei, and then you restore the image on the USB to the new replacement drive. Restart and you should be right where you were when you made the image.
If your large data bases are on a different drive and that drive fails, you will lose those files. If you don't care that you lose them you will be okay with just an image of your C drive. If you care about those files, you will also need to do a file/folder backup of those files. I'm not sure how "large" these files are but if you do a backup image of them, the destination USB would have to be big enough support the image of your C drive and an image of those files. To get an idea of what that entails, my C drive contains about 160Gb of data and it's backup image file size is about 100Gb with normal compression. I use a 1TB external USB drive as one of my backup destinations so I can keep more than one image. I also backup to an internal 1TB HD so I have more than one source for a backup image.