'Explore Image' Problem
This week I've downloaded Backupper Standard and carried out a File Backup on my 'C' and 'D' drives.
I've subsequently tried to carry out an 'Explore Image' exercise on both backups, but for some reason I can't make it work.
I've looked in the Help pages, but on the 'Explore Image' page, where it reads "assign drive letters for partitions in the image file to explore it in My Computer", I get semething different: "You could view the files and folders in the image file and click on Save As to extract them".
I'd be very grateful if somebody could offer advice and suggestions as to where I'm going wrong.
Comments
If you do a 'File Backup', you save an image of the files or folders.
This isn't the same as a disk or partition backup - these would normally have a drive letter associated with them, e.g. 'C' or 'E'.
When you go to explore the file or folder image, it says you can 'view the files and folders' - and you can inasmuch as you can see the listing.
To actually examine a file or folder contents, you have to extract it and save to a new location.
I find it simpler to do a System or Disk backup and explore the image that contains the files - then a new disk letter is generated and you can actually see the file without further extraction.
Coïncidence: Today I recommended a friend Aomei and demonstrated it. System backup worked fine. Explore image is a great option. Works fine with historical backup files. Then we tried File backup to image, only 2 folders needed, and we wanted to explore images again. But we were surprised that with file backup to image, you can only restore the files to open a Word.doc or so. You cannot explore image the same way as System or Partition backups. And that's a huge minus. It makes the file backup to image quiet useless. Instead we used File sync. But with file sync you cannot keep history.
Partition backup on my friends PC was not possible. The partition was colossal, and the documents folder to backup was only small. So we needed a folder selection which is not possible in System or partition backup.
In a future version I would also like an explore image in file backup, similar to system backup. The way its implemented at this moment, there is no benefit over Win7/8/10 backup functionality for files.
Many thanks for your informative inputs. Given the situation, which do you recommend: System or Disk backup? What are the pros and cons of each of them?
@GrahamJ: If possible, I prefer a system backup for C: (holding te OS) and a partition backup for
(holding data). Next you can schedule an incremental backup for C: and 
as you wish with different intervals. Automatically every week or every day. Even every hour. Incremental backup are 3x or 4x faster than full backups. You build up a history of incremental backups, so you can Explore the image (view and restore if needed) how a file was 1 week, 2 weeks or 3 weeks ago. Once in a while you can make a new full backup, which is the base for next incrementals: F->I->I->I->F->I->I->I
Hello, GrahamJ
"I get semething different: "You could view the files and folders in the image file and click on Save As to extract them"." Because you explor the file not the partition. The screenshot in the help is about the partition backup explore.
Johnny,
"But we were surprised that with file backup to image, you can only restore the files to open a Word.doc or so."
We have no idea of what you say, please give us more details.
" Given the situation, which do you recommend: System or Disk backup? What are the pros and cons of each of them?" You can do the disk backup or the suggestions Jhonny give you. Both is ok.
"But we were surprised that with file backup to image, you can only restore the files to open a Word.doc or so."
We have no idea of what you say, please give us more details.
Just as GrahamJ says, With "file backup to image" you can only Save As a file (to a temp location) before opening it. With System or Partition backups one can choose Explore Image and the drive(s) open up in Explorer and you can click a word document and see right away what's in it.
I like the Explore Image method but not the Save As method. I hope you can implement the Explore image via the Windows Explorer also in the "File backup to image" option.
I understand that the problem is that this is not a complete partition backup so your developers have to emulate a partition with only the backupped files and folders. A challenge !
Thanks for all of that. We will improve it in the future. Mybe you can directly double click the image,then you can see alll the contents.