UEFI windows 8 incremental backups

Discussion in 'Paragon Drive Backup Product Line' started by agent86, Mar 12, 2013.

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  1. agent86

    agent86 Registered Member

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    Purchased B & R 2012 Full version on the weekend. Little bit more complex than Acronis but it has a great WinPE 4 Builder that works!

    The problem I am finding is if I do a full backup of the full Windows 8 system drive it is backing up 3 other small partitions which as I know it are related to GPT, EFI and Recovery although not that clear in B & R.

    So far so good but it won't let me create an incremental backup due to this.

    I next tried it on Windows 7 without EFI and can backup complete disk and then incremental.

    So back to Windows 8 and if I select only the C:\ without the extra partitions I can incremental back that up but those other three partitions are needed aren't they to backup or could I just do them once?

    I can also make a Differential Backup but that would grow quite large I would imagine over a year. I have only done Incremental backups in the past, maybe Differential backup is faster, I don't know. Paragon is a little hard to get your head around but it seems like it will do more.
     
  2. Robin A.

    Robin A. Registered Member

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    AFAIK, there isn´t much information available so far about backing up UEFI systems, and the number of "small" partitions varies with different computers. Some have five or more.

    I think it´s a good idea to have at least one backup of all the partitions. This would permit to restore the system to a new disk. But in principle only C: must be backed up regularly, the others only occasionally.
     
  3. agent86

    agent86 Registered Member

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    Yes I thought about that but was concerned there would be data in the other partitions that might change, if not then your suggestion is good but I want to make sure. I like to understand, test and know my backup strategy will work. Paragon don't seem to be super user-friendly with documentation and their official forum is not English. I can't make sense of why backing up a UEFI full drive can't be incremental.
     
  4. crypto1701

    crypto1701 Registered Member

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    Paragon seems to be VERY incremental unfriendly, instead opting for differentials. The problem is that they don't use any type of indexing, so a differential backup can take longer than a full because it has to read the entire archive. I currently have an open ticket on this subject and the jist of their answer seems to be that only their (USD$175) professional backup program truly supports incrementals (at least as a companion backup). I have no idea why they would have gone this route.. it would take 24 hours to do a nightly differential backup of my entire system even though it's only backing up a few gig a night. I haven't seen such a scheme in 25 years of disaster recovery!

    I, too, used to use Acronis, but when they started changing low-level disk drivers with no way to remove the product, I moved away from them for good.
     
  5. agent86

    agent86 Registered Member

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    Yes it seems to take a long time to do differential backups.
    The interface is just very bad at least Acronis does a lot better.
    So Paragon makes a WinPE 4 boot disk with minimal fuss but Acronis after a couple of weeks and many hours just could not make a disk with drivers, Paragon just works.
    The other issue is I have a computer with 7 drives, You don't get drive names so very unfriendly there also.

    Anyone with experience of other Windows 8 UEFI friendly backup applications.

    I am nearly thinking on using Widows backup!
     
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