Backup whole of a Windows Computer

Support
#1

Hiya Everyone,

I am trialling Duplicacy and I’m really impressed so far!

I’ve got it working with an SMB share as the backup location backing up a test folder on my Windows machine.

However, I am unsure how to get it to back up the whole machine so I can restore the computer in the case of data loss.

I have created the filters file to include some directories I want to exclude (for example -C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\*), but I cannot figure out how to back up the whole computer (including other drives of which I have 4 which need backing up).

I have looked through the docs and wiki but can’t figure out how to accomplish this. Thank you very much for any help in advance!

#2

This really isn’t going to be possible with a Windows machine, and a file-based backup software like Duplicacy (or indeed any file-based backup software).

Duplicacy can backup files, but you wouldn’t be able to backup enough of them to make 100% restoration feasible, since a Windows OS install is more than just the files - there’s a whole bunch of inaccessible NTFS metadata, plus a slew of in-use system files, partition table, boot records etc…

Duplicacy is great for backing up files.

Pair it with a dedicated imagining tool, such as Veeam Agent for Windows. The latter is great for whole-disk images and can restore a whole Windows OS, but it’s not so great for incremental efficiency compared to Duplicacy. (Duplicacy you can run hourly backups without a thought, keep years worth of snapshots - Veeam though is best for maybe once-a-day, up to 14 days or so of history.)

This setup is a good way to meet the 2 in the 3-2-1 strategy.

#3

Hiya.

Really good and detailed reply thank you very much!

I was going to use veeam however it seems to create one big file with all the data on it, instead of the clusters which Duplicacy uses. This is an issue because on my unraid server which I’m backing up to, the individual drives are not big enough but together combined it is fine.
So I looked into Duplicacy which does this better.

I don’t mind having to reinstall windows as long as my core files are there. Is there a process which I can use to backup all files on my system, including the data on my separate drives, and excluding my exceptions list, using Duplicacy?

Basically I’m looking to backup my data not necessarily the windows OS since that isn’t important to me (as it’s replaceable), but the data I want kept is not.

Thanks again!