Macrium Reflect, paid version. Programmed full backups every week with daily incrementals in between. Backups deleted after 2 months. In this way, I'm never concerned about installing things to try or remove others. If anything goes wrong...

This is why I'm amazed with people who complain about a piece of software that corrupted their Windows installation. Do constant backups! And you'll have a clean system.

 

You should give it a go and decide that for yourself.

 

Aomei Backupper.
I don't know if anybody else already suggested it (I didn't read all the thread, sorry)
It's free for home use
Already tested many times for restoring after issues, works flawlessly, a little bit slow when loading win pe environment using its rescue cd media, but you can try to make a usb one, surely faster
A fantastic program, with many backup options, including incremental backup plannings

 

I have a PC running three hard drives, one drive is just for the system and is SSD ( Drive :C), the other two are A) for various bits of stuff( Drive :D), and the third is for Samples (Drive :E).
Now the trick I use is to do a System image (Free with Windows) of the system drive (Drive :C) to drive :D. Then copy all files on Drive :D and :E to an 2tb external drive cost about £50. If my system gets corrupt, its dead easy just to reinstall the complete :C drive in under ten minutes, or if any of the other drives are corupt, I can reinstall which ever folder I need, this has worked for me since windows 7 and never failed me, it also allows me the option of backing up when I want, and not to a schedule.
Hope this helps.

 

Trying Aoemi now. Bit of a noOb question: I am backing up my C drive as well as C:/Windows onto a partition of my C Drive (D). Should things go t*ts up, can I boot from the D partition to access the Aoemi interface and back-up options? TIA.

 

Best free system backup software? That's easy: Clonezilla Live. It works great with every OS. I use it often for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. Simply buy the smallest and cheapest USB flashdrive and put Clonezilla Live on it if you do it often. It is very fast and the image is GZip compressed. Easy for retrieving files from it. When working with SSDs, backup can take 5-10 minutes and retrieval of it, too. Well, depending on the amount of data you have on it, of course.

Acronis True Image is great, but it's not free, as in free, but it's "free" if you really want it, you can get it for "free".

 

Last edited: Jun 15, 2020