polygonum_on_google wrote:
On Saturday, 1 August 2020 09:14:36 UTC+1, Broadback wrote:
I have tried Macrium, the problem there is that is reformats the "dump"
disc into a format that windows10 10 does not recognise, so restore not
only fails but I ended up with an unusable system. being rather simple a
s straight forward program is required. Any suggestions please?

What are you trying to do?

Back up your documents? Have an image whereby you can restore everything to a bare disc?

What version of Macrium? It appears to have had quite a few decent
reports though I have no personal experience. Could it be that you
need an updated version?

You need a late-patched 6.x.x version, or really a 7.x.x
version, to back up a Windows 10 C: drive. It'll throw an
error before the backup is even a bit started, if you don't
have such a version. Macrium is rather conservative that way,
rejecting backup materials if the metadata analysis does
not complete normally at the start.

Using VSS, it can back up C: "hot" , while the OS is running.
But you have to make sure to select all the partitions
that accompany Windows 10, to have a good result later when
restoring to a blank new disk drive. You can't "just" backup
C: and leave the other ones unticked. And it won't warn you
either, that you've done something un-wise. It'll let
you proceed, because it's a power-user tool and takes
no prisoners.

There are situations where I only back up C: , because I know
an experiment will run amok and damage the contents on C: .
Because the boot materials seldom change, I can then restore
C: onto the drive and replace the old damaged C: .

But for a lot of other scenarios, you want to backup everything.
At least, until you understand what bits and pieces are "critical".

*******

The built-in backup solves this problem for you:

wbAdmin start backup -backupTarget:E: -allCritical -quiet

The allCritical tells "Windows 7 Backup" (the program), to back up
everything needed to boot C: . The output would be stored on E:\
Restore is available from the installer DVD.

Not that I'm recommending that tool, just demonstrating in
that example, the developer thought about users, and the
user not knowing which ones to grab at backup time.

Paul