Is there a free system backup app that works?

I am looking to back-up my Windows 7 hard drive, system and contents using a FREE application.

I tried using Windows own Backup and Restore utility but it fails, telling me that there isn’t enough room on a 1TB (931.48 GB available) external drive for the 555 GB on my C drive. Asking for help on Microsoft forums is useless. It directs me to posts by people who have the same problem who also can’t find a solution.

So I downloaded an installed EaseUS Todo Backup because it was free and had good reviews and was said to be simple to work. But, of course, after I selected C drive and the destination drive and clicked proceed I get, a “The location is invalid” error. Useless.

I don’t want to do trouble shooting. I don’t want to have to Google the error and search forums for solutions. I don’t want to change things in the registry. I don’t want to learn to write computer code. I don’t want workarounds. I just want to download and install a free app that will simply backup my hard drive. Does such an app exist?

I’m surprised EaseUS Todo failed. I’ve used it to back up several laptops to a 1 TB USB drive.

The only thing I can think of is whether it has a restriction on how the drive can be formatted. Mine is formatted FAT32, since my PS3 requires that. That prevented me from using Windows 7 backup, since it required HPFS.

I guess one other long shot is if the backup location has to be in a folder, not in the drive’s root folder. (That could be a restriction in case there’s a limit on the number of files in the root directory.)

Probably not much help, but it’s all I got. Good luck.

I use Cobian Backup.

OK, I’ve had the same problem even with paid products like Acronis.

There is something you can use, but you’re going to have to get a little technical. Download disk2vhd.

You run it from a dos prompt which you have to invoke as the admin. Let’s say your external drive is D: and you’re going to back up the entire c drive to the root of d. The command would be

disk2vhd c: d:\mybackup.vhd

That’s it. Type ‘disk2vhd /?’ for help - but the ain’t much. There’s some online though.

To restore from a backup, that gets tricky. I don’t know of any utility that will boot from a cd/dvd and restore from the vhd file although in theory, windows should since I think this is the format it uses. Maybe someone else knows and can help.

What I’ve done is just pull the drive out, put in another machine along with the vhd file, mount the vhd as a drive (you can do this from the drive manager in windows) and then clone the drive using other software.

But hey, even if you have to do a fresh windows install, like I said, you can always mount that vhd image and get all of your data back.

edit - when you run from dos - it just comes back to the c prompt with no message - use task manager to see it running.

Are you looking to back up every single thing or just the important stuff?
If all you’re interested in is your important data, Microsoft has a free utility called SyncToy that works very well and is designed to be run from time to time to pick up any changes since the last time it was run.

ETA, come to think of it, I see no reason why SyncToy couldn’t copy the entire drive other then the fact that since it isn’t really designed for that, it would probably take a really long time (but it’s free).

This guy works pretty nicely.
Only question might be whether or not it would see your external drive, but the odds aren’t bad.

Crashplan’s app can be used to do free offline backups. They sell online backup services but it isn’t required to use their software.

http://www.crashplan.com/consumer/download.html

I believe their backup engine is incremental in nature. This means that you will do one large initial backup which will take some time, and from then on can make periodic backups to the same device which will run much faster and only save changes.

I think he wants to back up his system, which means the whole C: partition.
Crashplan looks like ‘back up your files’ not your OS.

Yeah as far as I can tell backing up an entire disk image is beyond what Crashplan can do so that would exclude it for a full system backup/restore.

I use the native backup on Windows 7 to back up every day automatically. I back up all data and documents, not applications, of course. Never had a problem. Suggest the OP investigate that, and figure out how to get it working right. . I alternate my backups between two 1.5TB drives.

I used SyncToy to back up with tragic results. It doesn’t seem to be able to capture what is inside layers of folders. I was using it to backup many art projects, and I would check periodically and see the folders and thought all was well. I went to retrieve something, and all I had were empty folders inside of empty folders. I hung my head snd wept. YMMV, but maybe best not to trust your backups to something with “toy” in the name.

I’ve tried other backup systems before, but what I’m doing now works the best.

So the external drive is formatted to NTFS? If it isn’t you will have to reformat it.

This behavior sounds like Windows 7 dealing with a FAT32 drive. Some files created on an NTFS system can not be copied to a FAT32 drive and the ambiguous ‘invalid location’ error is Windows nearly useless response.

Both C drive and the external drive (to be used as the backup location) are NTFS formatted.

The ‘invalid location’ was an error message give by EaseUS Todo Backup, not Windows 7.

I downloaded and used Paragon Backup and Recovery 2012 Free. It ran a backup overnight and reported success this morning. The data (615 GB) now on the external drive is not accessible outside a recovery as it consists of a couple of files named ‘arc…’ and several files named ‘img…’. But in the event of a C drive failure I have a backup.

I like DriveImageXML (free for private use). It uses volume shadows, so you can back up the whole system while still using Windows. You can restore individual files from the system image. To do a whole-system restore, you obviously need to boot from something else, and it integrates well with bootable Windows environments like BartPE, or they provide a Linux-based bootable CD image that you can use.

Best of all, for me, is that it is battle-tested. I’ve used it many times to do full system backups and restores when testing stuff, and never had any problems with it.

Remember folks…an untested backup is not a backup.

make sure you know how to use the restore features and consider buying a spare hard drive to test with.

remove your original hard drive, mount the new drive and restore it from the backup.

If this works, you have a good backup system.

I just demonstrated this with a new 2011 server I installed, customer was very happy.

one other thing you may wish to consider.

If you have a friend willing to swap backup space you cab both install crashplan

free for personal use

basically it will, via crashplans servers, setup a link between your PC’s and you can backup to each others machines.

I’ve been using Macrium Reflect for years ever since the guys on The Screensavers recommended it. It’s full featured, fairly intuitive, and completely free for non-commercial use. Uses decent compression too. My Windows 7 system drive takes up about 115GB of space and Macrium compresses it into a 50GB backup file. Its fast too, only takes about 45 minutes. I’ve used it several times to recovery from total system corruption and it’s worked perfectly. You create a Linux boot CD (with the program itself) and use that to restore a boot drive from the image.

I received “this location is invalid” I used Windows Explorer to create a subdirectory off of the root on my USB backup drive. That’s it. Evidently EaseUS does not want to work off the root directory. This could be fixed trivially on the fly instead of giving an error message. But, it’s free!

Spend a little bit & get “H D Clone” and Bob’s your uncle.
Use on a regular basis & you have the whole drive. Pretty quick also.

Sometimes $30 is much cheaper in the long run than FREE.

YMMV

disk2vhd is the most robust, reliable, simple solution for Win7 that I have ever tried.

In contrast, every other thing that I have ever tried has had problems somewhere, somehow, sometime, on backup or restore.

Disadvantages are:

  1. It’s not a backup program. It makes a complete copy of everything. It’s very large.
  2. It’s not a restore program. You can’t mount the disk and get something off it.

Windows 7 allows you to Boot from VHD, or to mount your VHD as a drive. Both of those are useful when your drive fails.

BUT you can’t just mount the VHD as a drive while using the original drive, because the VHD was an exact copy of the original drive – it has the same ID number. You have to change that before you can have both drives open. And after you’ve done that, you have the possibility that you might have a brain fart and delete files from your backup.

I’m using VHD’s for backup when I can’t be bothered setting up a backup-and-restore solution. I know I can restore from VHD, I don’t need any particular software, it doesn’t get broken, I just take one copy every year or so and forget it.