Backup & Recovery 2011 (Advanced) Free

Hei I am a newbe and looking for advice.
I am just about to try to back up my harddisk which is using windows 7 64 bit and I am unsure about what to do. I can see that I choose what parts of my HD but what should I choose? Just Disc C for example? Will this back up all of my installed programmes plus personal files? Or should I select others also such as 'System'?

I have tried to follow the manual but I am a bit out of my depth.

If you can help me 'on the road' I would be most grateful.
Thanks

 

Depends what you want to achieve. I tend to use systemimage option
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Back-up-your-programs-system-settings-and-files

 

Thanks for your reply.
Are you saying that the installed MS Backup does the same job as this one and its all I need to use? It backs up my complete hard disc including all installed programmes and settings eg a 'mirror image'?

 

The MS product will make a basic image of your disk but does not have as many features as third-party products. You may find it adequate and actually easier to use if you aren't aware of why and where you would use the other options.

You could try and see where it takes you and if you find something that annoys you, see if another product addresses the issue. IIRC the MS backup wouldn't let me verifiy an image which I found unacceptable.

A word of caution, until you have actually made a backup and restored it, you can't have complete confidence it will work when you need it. A spare drive is useful for a test run. Pretend your disk crashed, put in the spare and see if you can restore the archive.

 

The only time I ever used the Windows image recovery, it failed but so did HDM2011S for whatever reason. To be honest, this was the first time HDM2011S failed after recovering around ten images in the past. My confusing thread about the issue: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=301247

 

I read the post you provided the link for.

Unfortunately, the problem could be cause by a lot of things. The fact that 2 different programs are failing and one was used about 10 times without a problem and then fails says there may be a hardware issue. Image programs are not hardware diagnostic programs and assume that the hardware is working properly.

About the only way to approach the problem is by trying to eliminate possible causes.

I'd reseat all disk cables. SATA cables seem to be more problematic than old IDE cables although you would think it should be the other way around.

Marginal RAM can show up problem that would never be noticed in lots of normal operations especially when you consider the large amount of data read and written at high speed. Regular PCs do not check the integrity of data being stored in RAM. Run a good RAM diagnostic for an extended period of time such as for a day or at least overnight. A free one is Memtest86+ from www.memtest.org . It is necessary to let it run for a long time because of the larger number of cells to be tested in multi-gigabyte RAM arrays and also a marginal cell may not fail on every access.

Run chkdsk /r on every partition on your disks, particularly the ones being backed up and the backup device. Image programs tend to be fairly good at tolerating filesystem errors but every now and then something will throw them for a loop. The /r also checks the surface of the un-used sectors as well so it will take some time to complete. It may also request a reboot to run.

You can also check the Windows Event Log to see if there are any strange hardware issues being reported such as SATA parity errors.

 

The original image failed to complete only with one of the builds but both failed on another image and the Windows image created at the same time failed too.

The orginally failed image had been restored in the past too. I use a docking station and the Paragon images are on a seperate HD than the Windows images. I create a Windows image first, swap the drive and create an image with HDM20111S. I also run CHKDSK on each of external HDs.

I've run CHKDSK now and it's good now, can't say about it at that time.

It's possible that once Paragon ran into whatever issue it did, it didn't recover itself. The fact that the option to show the problem file(s) showed no files at all leads me to believe that something went wrong in the program or something confused it. Maybe it was a bogus error and both builds stopped at the same exact point of 66%.

I've lost the confidence I once had for the program.

It's a Dell PC and I just ran the Pre Boot tests and also the extensive memory diagnostics which found no problems at all.

 

I started this thread but its got very technical ... for me at least
Can I drag it back to my basic question being per the quote above?
Yes I have a lot of learning to do but I want to at least 'back up all' ...
Thanks

 

Then chose system image option in your Windows backup (you can then select what partition you want if there is more than 1.) On this occasion select them all while you learn (what each partition holds) that way at least you have the whole drive backed up as it. It would be good to have an external drive to store the backup on

 

Thanks for confirming. I have an external HD ... will give it a go!
Ron