AmateurRadio.com

About 10 years ago I posted about backing up your PC. Since May 2016 when I posted I would image even more radio op's depend to some degree on their PC's. Even if you are a minimalist when it comes to mixing ham radio and computers I am sure most of you have a PC and depend on it for something. MANY times in the past I have said "I have learned my lesson" when one of my beloved PC's either just stopped working or the OS hiccuped or was doing back flips. When one or all of these things happen and I do say WHEN because whether you like it or not you beloved PC will let you down. If you have not backed up it is to late and the fun begins to see what and if you can salvage anything. 

I do backup and have for a very long time. I have a clone backup and an image backup. In my PC I have 4 drives all are SSD drives. The main drive is an M.2, then I have 3 1TB drives. The break down goes as follows, SSD 1 is for a clone, SSD 2 is for image and finally SSD3 another clone. Now I do realize there are some PC whiz bongs out there that will have advice for me regarding this but this works for me. Do I have cloud storage, no I don't. The way I figure it is I have enough on my PC for backup and well if the PC catches fire and the drives are toast I more to worry about as most likely either all or most of my house went with it. 

Have I ever had to fall back on my backup's over the past few years....HELL YES! With the setup I have I can do the following:

From the image drive I have multiple snap shots of what is on my PC. I can pick a date open it and look around via file explorer, the desktop and so on. For example I deleted a file on my PC but then 3 month later realize I really really need it. I can go to the image drive look for an image that is before the date I deleted the oh so important file. Then open that image and navigate to where that file is and I can drag it onto my desktop. 

My clone drives

The clone drive is a duplicate drive of my main C drive. If I get up one morning and start the PC and greeted with ZERO Win11 working. No problem I just turn off the PC, restart, press a certain F key that takes me to my BIOS and tell my PC to boot from my clone drive. I then am back in biz, I then I have the time to determine if my C drive is software or hardware related. If it was a Windows melt down I can reformat the drive. Then ask my backup software clone of my drive I am now using back to my C drive. Then restart in BOIS and direct my PC to start using drive C again. 

To both examples above the very import thing is to regularly backup your PC. You are wasting your time if you only back up let say every 6 months. So many things can change over that time and if you do need to use the clone you may have lots missing. I do a backup once a week and really with SSD drives it takes no time at all. In the above picture you can see the top drive SN770 section 3(C) has 299.52 GB of info. My clone drive below CT1000 has 291.26 GB of info and this is only after I did a backup yesterday. 

The software I use is free and very simple to use. I have asked it on numerous occasions to save me and it has never let me down. The software is called Macrium Reflect free version. There is no long a free version available from the Macrium site they have stopped that. But if you are interested go to Odergeeks.com in the search bar type Macrium Reflect and you will be directed to working download of the free version.