creating system images ... is EaseUS OK ?

[abolibibelot]

@“hydra3333”

zip and rar aren't really for system image backups
The non-classic Outlook does not support PST, which is unfortunate ... and isn't really related to system image backups either.
the topic was intended to be more about backing up and restoring the system disk including windows and recovery partitions etc, rather than data backup.
thanks for the info though.

Sorry I got carried away... I do that a lot... That must have been my job description when I was appointed as a new soul on this already overcrowded planet: getting carried away, being off-topic, barely relevant, making as little sense as humanly possible... And yet whenever I try to care about the rest of the world, I realize that it's making even less sense than I do on average...

@“GAhere”

Cons, imaging and compression take considerable amount of time to perform so backups and restores depending on how much data you are dealing with could potentially take hrs to perform.

I don't think that it's that much longer with a somewhat recent computer, the compression scheme used by those programs is not designed to be tremendously efficient, so it's unlikely to max out CPU power. And there are usually several compression levels, if the CPU is low end and speed is more important than size, it may be beneficial to set it to the lowest level available. (A not-so-wise man once said that a wise man once said: “What's important to you? Speed, quality? or size? (pick two!)” Well in that case the compression is lossless so quality is a given, then it's a matter of speed vs. size.)

Cons, can't keep the backup drive copy connected to the system, Windows will treat the drive like the system has two boot drives and will mark one as unformatted to prevent damage to the other drive..

Does it really? Didn't know that...

You will lose a small amount of data between system clones, however that loss can be easily mitigated by making a habit of copying new or changed data files to a external UBS backup drive.

What do you mean here? What data gets lost?

Smart copy is far, far faster as it only copies the total drive DATA omitting copying the empty space on the drive.

Empty spaces – what are we living for? Abandoned places – I guess we know the score...

Sorry, got carried away again...

Bit for bit copy on the other hand is much slower as it copies the entire drive structure bit for bit, it is more useful in the event of a damaged drive and you want to attempt to recover the entire drive contents.. Sometimes you get lucky and it works..

I'm not sure how or when this could happen... If the drive is damaged such backup programs are not the best way to handle the situation, and if a drive is deteriorating but still in good enough condition for one such program to operate, I would think that using the “smart” mode would be preferred to get as much useful data as possible and not waste precious time on free clusters (since a malfunctioning drive can fail completely at any moment).

But even if your data is changing drastically daily, you can simply use an external drive to copy the new data to at the end of the day (this can be automated through Windows Task Scheduler).

Preferably with Robocopy, as it's among the few tools on Windows that allows to preserve all timestamps. Unless it's changed recently (but I'd be very surprised), whenever files are copied through Windows Explorer, creation and access timestamps are altered. Did many tests a long while ago, the only three tools I found which allowed to preserve all timestamps were Robocopy (with the /DCOPY:T option to also preserve directories timestamps), Synchronize It! and FastCopy. I'd be curious to know if there are other options by now.

As I mentioned long ago (gee, nearly 10 years ago), Synchronize It! 3.5 has a bug (which I reported) whereby it corrupts “sparse” files (files written in such a way that their empty clusters are not actually allocated, which is distinct from NTFS compression). The author provided me with a 3.6 beta version which fixes that issue, but never made it public. I had an impromptu chat with the author just 5 years ago on 2021-03-23 (it was 5 AM over here, really didn't expect an actual human being to answer my question in the wee hours!), he said that he had been meaning to make a new version with added features, but didn't have time to complete it; he said that he would at least gather all fixes and make a new release. I just checked: there still hasn't been a new release since then... and, well, those past few years must have been quite hectic, as the guy (hopefully still) lives in Minsk... (That was among my first thoughts when the war in Ukraine began: perhaps there will never be a new version of Synchronize It!...)
Anyway, Synchronize It! 3.6 beta (more precisely version 3.5.0.1713 from 2015-10-04) can be found here:
https://grigsoft.com/wndsyncbu.zip

Sorry, got carried away again...

[GAhere]

Ya, there is a lot of "carried away" of misinformation going on..

Time to hop off this train wreck of misinformation..

[abolibibelot]

Ya, there is a lot of "carried away" of misinformation going on..

Time to hop off this train wreck of misinformation..

Sorry, what was misinformation there?
Oh well... not my day today... not my year this year... not my life this life...