If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.

Home

20 March 2026 | by Mike VE9KK | Share | | Leave a Comment (8)

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 Oldergeeks website in the search bar type Macrium Reflect and you will be directed to working download of the free version and do so at your own risk.

Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

8 Responses to “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”

Jack VE3LNY:
20 March 2026 at 23:46 UTC
OR just pay for it, there are good choices like Aomei or Paragon, well worth the cost.
Mike VE9KK:
21 March 2026 at 10:07 UTC
Good morning Jack thanks for reading the post and stopping to leave a comment. Yes very true there are some very good choices out there. I had a paid version of Acronis backup software. I had it for a few years but found it difficult to use. I came across the Macrium site that offered a totally free version of their software. They stopped the freeware version in 2022 and support in 2024. The software was released by Macrium as freeware, no license required and for home use. Mind you there no longer is support offered and one day it may not work after a Windows update. But if you want to outlay cash and pay for a program find and dandy. I prefer to use it when it’s freeware that is legal and free.
Have a good weekend
Mike
VE9KK
Tim Kd0uuu:
22 March 2026 at 13:36 UTC
I have found that often it takes different software depending on what OS I am backing up. I agree, bare metal recovery backups and a incremental backup are valuable. I started using VENTOY bootable USB and keep ISO’s for all my favorite recovery programs. If you can boot to USB with the size of USB drives these days, you can backup a lot. Keep in mind that speed is king so if you have slow USB, you may want to use the hard drive interface in the computer to write the clone or backup image.
Mike VE9KK:
22 March 2026 at 15:55 UTC
Good afternoon, Tim very nice to hear from you and welcome to the blog. I had a look at VENTOY as well as some YouTube videos as well. Very interesting software and it has many applications.
73,
Mike
VE9KK
Sam W3OHM:
24 March 2026 at 03:45 UTC
Mike,
I have used Macrium for probably a decade or more. You can backup any OS drive with it using Windows. I have used it to clone Linux drives and image and clone even USB sticks. Amazingly useful!
73,
Sam
W3OHM
Mike VE9KK:
24 March 2026 at 09:43 UTC
Good morning Sam very nice to hear from you and thanks for taking the time to comment. I have found Macrium to be user friendly as I did try Acronis in the past and found it a bit confusing.
73 and have a great week.
Mike
VE9KK
Atila Baskocak TA1DX:
25 March 2026 at 07:29 UTC
TNX, It was something I’d always thought about but kept putting off implementing.
73! Atila
Mike VE9KK:
25 March 2026 at 09:28 UTC
Good morning Atila and thanks for taking the time to leave a comment. Yes this is a task that most only think about when HD failure has happened. There were times im the past when issues happened here and I promised myself that next time I would be ready.Then next time came and I said the same thing again.
73,
Mike
VE9KK