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Which OS (and filesystem) are you running?
My PC's running on on Windows 10 (NTFS)
acronis, but costs much and free things working too.
easeus, works if you know how to use it.
aomei, almost same as easeus.
macrium reflect x, never used it so far.
as last i saw newly, hasleo backup, but seems paid too.
I've got Aomei Backupper Pro. Good idea. Didn't even think of it, as I only use it to backup folders/email. Then again, isn't there a convenient solution without relying on paid software (which creates proprieatary archives)?
Never tested that.
https://www.iperiusbackup.com/index.aspx
Clonezilla comes in mind too.
Clonezilla may be a good idea. Will have a look
Thanks! Worst case, I still got Aomei
RescueZilla is also good
clonezilla or rescuezilla is the best for this.
dd maybe Clonezilla, Clonezilla will shrink the freespace and works better when restoring to different sized drives.
dd is stupid simple to use.
If it's a name brand external drive, they'll have a branded version of Acronis to image backup the drive.
Otherwise, Veeam agent.
dd is also what chatgpt suggested. For whatever reason, for things like this I am always looking for special software that does this, than use the (simple) solutions at hand.
for NTFS, there was a tool called Symantec Ghost which does super fast clone.
for ext4 or other Linux ones, FSArchiver does the same perfect work.
You might consider using a tool like
zerofreeto clear the unused space on the drive to provide better compression.You can also use the technique describe here - https://tecadmin.net/drive-and-partition-backup-examples-with-dd-command/, or even send it to a remote location through an ssh with the help of
ncat orsocatthen usepv -ptab` command to track the transfer rate.Clonezilla or Macrium Reflect
Store the backup on a separate drive for future restoration.
I also reached out to Aomei support, and they recommended a sector-by-sector disk backup, so when restored on another drive, that one will be bootable, too.
You generally only do that for unsupported filesystems or weird partitions. It'll take much longer to backup and restore.
I tried Aomei years ago. You'd have to pay me to QA their software, they don't seem to.