Backing Up The Operating System

2019-01-21 AOMEI Backupper is the ticket

Oh let me count the ways. Vista/Win7 has easy backup for some versions. I like Drive Snapshot. I have not had to restore a Vista/Win7 install with Drive Snapshot but I hear it works, knock on wood. Vista/Win7 did something odd with the boot sector but I think Drive Snapshot worked that out with recent versions. I like how fast DS runs and how it runs from a little portable posture without having to leave Windows. Drive Snapshot is not free.

Restoring the OS needs to be done from DOS with full access to the NTFS partition. I have an NTFS boot CD with DS on it for just such a reason. This is somewhat trickier than using Acronis, etc. but I've had Acronis do some crazy errors in the past and don't really trust it. Drive Snapshot just works.

I like Second Copy. I've tried SyncToy and other sync. programs and don't like the setups and scheduling. Cobian created a deep file structure that took me forever to delete. You do not want to go through this.