https://pureinfotech.com/2012/09/11/create-a-windows-8-system-image-or-full-backup-step-by-step/

Toni Marie Monturo

What works well for me after following the technology curve from backup tapes to CDs to DVDs but skipping bluray is not to use any of these intermediate media at all. Instead I use a similarly sized and speed hard disk in an external usb enclosure that is easy to open and swap drives in and out. Storage has gotten so cheap it’s ridiculous.

So once a month or week or whatever, I do an offline (ipl with the backup product disk) clone of the current hard drive. Good products are Macrium Reflect (free) and Acronis TrueImage (free from and for specific hard drive manufacturers like WDC). The offline backups run amazingly fast compared to any program that has to run through the standard Windows interfaces and overhead and I don’t have to sit and constantly feed in storage media. Just start the clone operation and go do something in the real world for about an hour or so then come back and make sure it shows no errors. If there’s something wrong you can fix it right then.

Now here’s the real benefit of this scheme, when the clone is complete, I swap the hard drives with the current internal disk moving to the external enclosure and vice versa. I know almost immediately if I have a functional replacement for the old system hard drive by actually using the cloned copy as the new system hard drive. This is much better than having to wait for a disaster to occur and then do the real “test” of whether another program can read the backup media and use it to create a working version of the system. A side benefit is that each hard drive gets used half as much as would be typical so they last longer and errors are that much farther apart.

You will always test the backup/restore function to see if the process, programs and media can do the job in real disaster situation. I prefer to not do it at the time of the disaster. It’s not unheard of to think you are in good shape by doing regular backups only to have your beliefs shattered when you try to restore your data and find out there’s a problem.

Actually I am typing this on a new Windows 8 system which has been cloned through the process above and the hard drives switched. I know the one I just took out works (because it was running till then) and now am sure the new one works as you see since it is now the current system drive. The former system drive can be sent offsite (to my brother’s who happens to live around the block) and the possibility of there being restore errors as well as the time and effort of running a restore to get my system functional again are both eliminated.

Thanks

Toni Marie Monturo