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What options should i choose for my needs?

TiggerdyretTiggerdyret
in AOMEI Products Support
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

  • FlyerFlyer
    edited April 2019
    You can do what you want with the free version. Some tasks that would be done automatically for you with the paid version you will have to do automatically.... like deleting older versions if running out of space, etc.
    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.
  • TiggerdyretTiggerdyret
    edited April 2019
    Thanks for taking your time answering my questions. So the main difference between a backup and a clone is that a backup is compressed and achieved into an image file along the other files on the destination drive and the clone formats the destination drive and copies the drive into loose files?

    So if store my image to a large external drive separate from my system drive can I make a AOMEI Bakupper boot device on a usb-stick and boot from that, and then load the image from my external drive?

    Just to clarify I actually don't need to back up the folders with my music library I just need for the image of my main drive to still recognize all the paths, that my apps have to these library folders, after a restore. It's not music as in an mp3 library, but the libraries for my synthesizers, samplers and my other music software. Many of these are installed to my C:, but the files they use to operate and play sound with are very large data bases, which run on a separate SSD.
  • FlyerFlyer
    A clone is an exact copy of the drive you cloned and would be used to replace that drive as in going from an HD drive to an SSD or from a smaller SSD to a larger. After the clone, you just replace the old drive with the new.
    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.
  • TiggerdyretTiggerdyret
    Thanks, I think all just make a clone to my SSD and a backup on my external then :)
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