Macrium trashed my backup drive. Another Bkup software?

[Chris Noble]

What's simple is backing up (and verifying) what's changed since the last verified backup. Backing up the 90% of files on your computer that have not changed is an invitation for something to go wrong.

Ummm, like what?

I trust simple... and smart ;-)

I don't image my system drive very often. Even if I restored a 3 month old image, I just have to run a few software updates. I don't keep any of my data on the system drive.

My system drive is fully backed up at the beginning of each month, differentials once a week and an incremental on the other 6 days of the week in the morning.

If I try a new program and decide I don't want it, I can just restore the computer to that morning's backup. I don't need to worry about not being able to fully uninstall a program.

If a Windows update has a problem, I just restore the computer to the state before the update.

If the disk fails, I can quickly restore the operating system to a new disk without spending time updating program files and loading and updating Windows required by a three-month-old backup.

Having very recent backups just simplifies restoring a computer and saves unnecessary work.

An added bonus is that you can open any backup and retrieve any files that you may have accidentally deleted.

Absolutely. A backup scheme without a differential and incremental schedule makes no sense.

 

[XiaoDeer]

What's simple is backing up (and verifying) what's changed since the last verified backup. Backing up the 90% of files on your computer that have not changed is an invitation for something to go wrong.

Ummm, like what?

I trust simple... and smart ;-)

I don't image my system drive very often. Even if I restored a 3 month old image, I just have to run a few software updates. I don't keep any of my data on the system drive.

My system drive is fully backed up at the beginning of each month, differentials once a week and an incremental on the other 6 days of the week in the morning.

If I try a new program and decide I don't want it, I can just restore the computer to that morning's backup. I don't need to worry about not being able to fully uninstall a program.

If a Windows update has a problem, I just restore the computer to the state before the update.

If the disk fails, I can quickly restore the operating system to a new disk without spending time updating program files and loading and updating Windows required by a three-month-old backup.

Having very recent backups just simplifies restoring a computer and saves unnecessary work.

An added bonus is that you can open any backup and retrieve any files that you may have accidentally deleted.

How much unnecessary work are we talking about here? To the best of my recollection, I have reverted to restoring a Windows backup exactly one time in the past 20 years.

 

[drj3]

What's simple is backing up (and verifying) what's changed since the last verified backup. Backing up the 90% of files on your computer that have not changed is an invitation for something to go wrong.

Ummm, like what?

I trust simple... and smart ;-)

I don't image my system drive very often. Even if I restored a 3 month old image, I just have to run a few software updates. I don't keep any of my data on the system drive.

My system drive is fully backed up at the beginning of each month, differentials once a week and an incremental on the other 6 days of the week in the morning.

If I try a new program and decide I don't want it, I can just restore the computer to that morning's backup. I don't need to worry about not being able to fully uninstall a program.

If a Windows update has a problem, I just restore the computer to the state before the update.

If the disk fails, I can quickly restore the operating system to a new disk without spending time updating program files and loading and updating Windows required by a three-month-old backup.

Having very recent backups just simplifies restoring a computer and saves unnecessary work.

An added bonus is that you can open any backup and retrieve any files that you may have accidentally deleted.

How much unnecessary work are we talking about here? To the best of my recollection, I have reverted to restoring a Windows backup exactly one time in the past 20 years.

It probably depends on what you do with your computer. I have two laptops which I occasionally backup. They are used mainly for the browsing the internet or streaming things to a TV. Since they are both Windows 10, there are relatively few updates, so frequent backups are not necessary.

My desktop is used for many more things. While restoring the desktop is not an everyday occurrence, it is far more frequent. I have the Updates set to getting the new updates as soon as they are available. I often load trial programs which could be useful, but if I find I would not use them, I just restore the computer.

Once in the last year a Windows 11 update cause my computer to crash. An old backup would have required installing all the Windows and other program updates. I restored the computer is a few minutes to its previous state and delayed the update until the next update was released.

It is not something that is absolutely necessary, but it makes my life a lot simpler. I don't have to worry about programs causing a problem, my computer crashing, or getting some virus. Restoring the compute is fast and easy and once setup requires no maintenance.

 

[Austinian]

It probably depends on what you do with your computer. I have two laptops which I occasionally backup. They are used mainly for the browsing the internet or streaming things to a TV. Since they are both Windows 10, there are relatively few updates, so frequent backups are not necessary.

My desktop is used for many more things. While restoring the desktop is not an everyday occurrence, it is far more frequent. I have the Updates set to getting the new updates as soon as they are available. I often load trial programs which could be useful, but if I find I would not use them, I just restore the computer.

That is also my situation. This desktop has three boot drives, one of which is mainly for experimentation. They all get fairly frequent backups.

No surprise, the 'experimental' drive needs an occasional restore when things go wrong.

None of the laptops has anything that's critically important, so they get backups when I think something has changed on them that I want to keep.

 

[skyglider]

You can try a different docking station to see if it'll read the hard drive. The likely case is that because your hard drive or dock had an issue, macrium froze because it couldn't read/write.

That's the first thing I tried. I have an older USB2 docking station and a later USB3 docking station. The affected bkup HDD still shows as unallocated in the USB2 docking station.

It's not like you're cloning a drive where the boot partitions get modified. What you are doing is no different than copying a picture of another file to an external hard drive. It's like saying that copying a jpg to your hard drive corrupted your drive.

Either way, your drive may still be salvageable.

It's OK if the "unallocated" bkup drive is not salvageable since I alternate backups to two HDD drives.

I backup "all" of my data in real-time to an internal SSD so I've not lost any data whatsoever.

I did a fresh install of Win11 on my new DIY desktop PC and am installing the programs that I use as I go along. I always do fresh installs of Windows and programs when I build a new PC. I never try to restore a system backup (like Win10) and then try to get it to work on a new PC, and then try to upgrade it to Win11.

 

[Chris Noble]

What's simple is backing up (and verifying) what's changed since the last verified backup. Backing up the 90% of files on your computer that have not changed is an invitation for something to go wrong.

Ummm, like what?

I trust simple... and smart ;-)

How much unnecessary work are we talking about here? To the best of my recollection, I have reverted to restoring a Windows backup exactly one time in the past 20 years.

I have on occasion restored a file or folder that I had modified or deleted by mistake. Fortunately, I have never had an OS corruption, or lost a laptop, which are to me the most likely full-restore situations. But I have also ported entire systems to new hardware using a backup.

With up-to-date backup software and Cloud services, it's simple and pain-free insurance.

I always buckle my car seat-belt, even though I've never had to "use" it.

 

[drj3]

You can try a different docking station to see if it'll read the hard drive. The likely case is that because your hard drive or dock had an issue, macrium froze because it couldn't read/write.

That's the first thing I tried. I have an older USB2 docking station and a later USB3 docking station. The affected bkup HDD still shows as unallocated in the USB2 docking station.

If the docking station caused a problem with the drive partition being corrupted, it will be corrupted on any other docking station. My DAS that caused the two "Unallocated" drives still worked correctly almost of all the time. However, the "Unallocated" drives were "Unallocated" on my other good DAS once the partitions were corrupted. Only recovery of the partitions with Diskgenius restored the drives to working condition.

If the problem occurred as you were doing a full restoration of the drive with Macrium, then anything that disrupted the restoration might potentially cause a drive problem since this would overwrite the partition information.

However, simply reading from the drive should not affect the drive partition since it is not writing anything to the disk.

It's not like you're cloning a drive where the boot partitions get modified. What you are doing is no different than copying a picture of another file to an external hard drive. It's like saying that copying a jpg to your hard drive corrupted your drive.

Either way, your drive may still be salvageable.

It's OK if the "unallocated" bkup drive is not salvageable since I alternate backups to two HDD drives.

I backup "all" of my data in real-time to an internal SSD so I've not lost any data whatsoever.

I did a fresh install of Win11 on my new DIY desktop PC and am installing the programs that I use as I go along. I always do fresh installs of Windows and programs when I build a new PC. I never try to restore a system backup (like Win10) and then try to get it to work on a new PC, and then try to upgrade it to Win11.