Backups are an oft-discussed topic on Ask Leo!, but options for how best
to perform backups and what tools to use can be both confusing and difficult
to find.
In this video excerpt from an Ask Leo! webinar,
Iâll provide a brief overview of one of the options: Backup & Recovery 2011 (Advanced)
Free.
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Download: paragon.mp4 (39M).
Transcript
Paragon has a free backup utility and Iâve already installed it here. Backup utilities in general are going to want to have administrative level access to your system so when you when you fire them up, they will in all likelihood throw UAC prompt if you have UAC enabled.
Iâm not going to try and actually perform backup here. The issue is that with, ideally Iâd like a 20 minute segment here on a particular program; a backup is going to take much longer than that so Iâm simply going to walk you through some of the processes that apply to this program.
One of the important tools that you almost always want to start with regardless of what tool you are using is the Recovery Media Builder. Acronis called it the Rescue Media; other tools have different names for it but the bottom line is that when your hard disk fails in the worst possible way and you cannot boot your system, then you need a way to boot your machine such that then you run your backupâs software to be able to restore a backup image to the failed hard drive or replacement hard drive.
The program, this particular program has a Recovery Media Builder. What it allows you to do is create Recovery Media to Flash Memory which you can boot from or to CD/DVD. In general, there are some advanced kinds of things you can play with here but for the most part, you just really donât need to unless you just have specific needs that go beyond the need to recover things.
So, in this particular case, what Paragon has is this emulator. This particular virtual machine that Iâm using to demonstrate the software on does not have a writable CD ROM/DVD ROM drive so instead what they offer is this emulator that when I say ânextâ it will go off and create a .ISO file. A .ISO file is an image of a CD or DVD that can then later be burned to CD or DVD. That then, once burned to that media, is something you can then use on your computer to boot and then automatically run. In fact, Iâm going to see if we canât automatically run from this thing in a moment. That thing actually runs in such a way that it allows youâŠit actually runs a copy of the backup software. You can use it not only for restoring but for actually performing image backups if you so desire but the most important thing is that it runs the backup software so that you can perform a recovery that will identify your backup drive; it will let you select the backup that you want to restore and then the hard drive you want to restore that backup to.
Now, this is the free version of Paragon. Backing up a machine is actually fairly straight forward. They have a nice little wizard that allows you to select what it is that you want to back up. In this particular machine, I have two hard drives. I have what is the âCâ drive on this machine and then I also have a second drive, the âDâ drive that Iâm using as my example of my external backup drive.
So one would simply select that particular drive to be backed up. You can see that theyâve taken a look at not just the size of the drive but the size of the data on the drive and estimated that itâs going to take this 32 GB drive is gonna take about 3.5 GB to back up. And that includes some amount of compression. I think thereâs roughly around 6 GB of data on here.
Changing backup settings is what allows us to configure some more specific things like how do you want things named, what kind of compression do you want to useâŠin some cases, depending on what it is you are backing up to, you may need to be able to take the image and chop it up into multiple files that can each then be stored separately. Usually if you are backing up to an external drive thatâs formatted say âNTFSâ this simply isnât an issue.
A lot of people like to password protect their archives; thatâs a good idea if you are potentially concerned that someone might actually access your backups who shouldnât, because obviously then they would be able to restore them themselves and examine whatâs on there.
One of the things that Iâve noticed that these utilities do is, or that Paragon does that I wasnât familiar with previously, is that they will skip what they call OS auxiliary files. Specifically that means pagefile.sys and hiberfile.sys. In other words, your paging file and your hibernation file. Thereâs actually no reason to back those files up and they tend to be kinda large. So thatâs an easy one to get. Raw processing is soemthing, again, you can ignore. That actually backs up empty sectors as well as the sectors that contain data. âSkipping the archive files that are stored in archive libraryâŠâ typically what I believe this covers is that you can actually store your backups on the drive you are backing up. That typically doesnât make sense, but it also means you donât want to back up your âbackupsâ. You should in general be backing up to another drive â ideally an external drive and possibly a drive over on another machine over on your network.
Letâs seeâŠthere are some options for recording; again, most of these you can ignore. Hot processing is simply a way that files can be backed up while they are in use; the defaults are great. You can actually have it exclude certain files. Again, I want a full backup; what weâre about to do here is the closest thing to a system image that youâre gonna get. And in that case, I donât want it to skip anything; I want it to back up everything.
So we are going to save data to a local drive. As you can see, you can burn to CD or DVD; you can actually FTP it somewhere or you can save it to a naked, unformatted or formatted physical partition which essentially is a true drive cloning operation.
Now weâre backing up local drive C so what we really want to do is to place this on âDâ. And in D there already is an archive for one of the days here I was testing this out already. So weâre gonna go ahead and have this save it on D; going to hit ânextâ â this kind of allows us to add a comment to the backup and at this point we could schedule this backup or we could backup now. Iâm gonna say âbackup nowâ. It summarizes all of the choices that weâve made; we hit ânextâ, and we hit âfinishâ. Now, the thing thatâs a little bit odd about Paragon and this actually reflects, I believe, their history of being a partition management tool or at least having this software be derived from a partition management tool is that weâve said everything; weâve defined the backup and weâve said âfinishâ but in fact it hasnât started yet.
Much like partition management tools, theyâll let you define a number of operations and then theyâre not done until you actually say âapplyâ, this backup program does the same thing. So Iâm not going to apply as I said earlier, Iâm going to go ahead and discard and go on to a couple of other things. Now one of the options that youâll notice that are missing in our backup and itâs true regardless of whether you do the backup directly or if you schedule it is that thereâs no incremental backup. Paragon Free only does full or file-based system backups. What that means is that my normally recommended approach of doing a full backup followed by a periodic incremental backup isnât available in the free tool.
Now, any backup is better than no backup. I certainly donât want that to get in the way of things and itâs a free tool; itâs a wonderful way to system images or system restores but if youâre looking for more features; if you want to set up the more traditional periodic full and incremental or differential backups, thatâs at the point at which youâll probably need to upgrade to the next version- to the paid version of Paragon.
Restoring is a simple task. There are two approaches that you can take here. The first one is we can of course is that we can go in and (take a look at the hard drive) we can actually go in and walk the contents of that backup image and say I want to restore this file and this file and then it will do so. Or, more commonly, you can select the whole thing and it will restore the entire thing. Now in the case of the C drive, that doesnât necessarily work. In other words, restoring the entire drive may or may not actually work because of course, you are running your system from it. Thatâs when the bootable Rescue Media comes into play. And I think given the amount of time where this is going on, Iâm not going to show you that today. The goal here is that this interface allows you to go into a system backup; go into a full backup and extract and restore specific files which in my experience 80 â 90% of what you end up wanting to do with your backups any way is not restore your entire system but restore a specific file that you lost some time prior or specific file to which specific changes have been made and you want the older versions. This is one to way to make sure that absolutely every file has been backed up and then can be individually recovered later.
If we were to actually reboot from the recovery disk, what you would see is a second interface that is actually very similar to what you are seeing here. In this particular case, it happens to be a Linux based tool but that doesnât really matter. The Paragon utility is pretty much the same thing of what you would see here. The difference being that since you would be running from the CD or USB drive that youâve booted from the C drive, the drive that you are attempting to restore to would be fully available and then could be restore in its entirety.
The Virtualization Tasks I actually would ignore, to be honest. Iâm not sure that I completely understand them myself other than to say that apparently there are some interesting ways to copy backups to and from drive images created by various popular virtual machine technologies unfortunately, not including Parallels Desktop which I happen to use. In a sense, thatâs Paragon in a nutshell; that is a free drive imaging tool; you can do full system backups with this thing; you can do a system image or image of any drive for free and be able to recover completely or in part. If you want to start setting up more complex backups, and incremental backups then it will be time to upgrade to the paid version of Paragon.
Hi,
I think I am using the same program(Paragon 2011 Advanced) and I think there is a slight but important error in the commentary. When restoring the whole of C drive it is not necessary to use the boot media (CD or Flash) Paragon will start the restore process and then ask if you wish to proceed by shutting down and restarting the PC. If you choose to do this Paragon will reboot the machine and complete the restore after which the machine will be turned on and your desk top will appear. All automatic and without the use of external media.
Regards Alex
Doesnât Windows 7 do the same thing? Create a system boot disk first, then do an image back up for complete restore?
23-Sep-2011
What I want to know is, does either Paragon, or Acronis allow you to backup â not to restore, mind you, but to actually BACKUP  â the computer from the (so-called) âRescue Mediaâ â that is, from totally outside of Windows? I have never trusted those programs that have purported to back up Windows from within Windows â that is, while it was up, active, and running (what was the name they used? âShadow copyingâ, or something like thatâŠ?) Uh-huh. Yeah. Right⊠Not bloody likely!!!
So â does either Paragon or Acronis offer backup entirely from the CD, withe Windows inactiveâŠ?
23-Sep-2011
i used to use acronis; iâve been using paragon for past copule years (various reasons, reliability), and paid version. I feel it is a great program.
re: windows 7 doing same thing; in a nutshell, no; windows will do backup/recovedry, but is limited in options, whree to store, how to recover, etc
one advantage of paragon is not only that the backup can be password protected, but that when pasword protecting the back up, it actually (from my understanding) ENCRHYPTS the backup data, so that if someone got the image, they could not get into the data at all, even to raw data.
it can even back up directly to a truecrypt mounted drive (so can do backup to an external drive that has been truecrypted (there are special steps to MOUNT the truecrypted image, I have been in corespondence with paragon about this, have to use a workaround currently), but overall has been a reliable program.
nick
Hi Tim & Glenn, Yes with Win7 you can create a recovery disk and make a drive image. I choose to use Paragon because although you have a recovery disk option for when it isnât possible to boot otherwise you can ,under most circumstances, just restore without having to go to the trouble of digging out your recovery media. Win 7,if I am not mistaken, doesnât allow this. Also the image that Win 7 makes is not compressed although I will say I have only limited experience with the Win 7 backup facility and perhaps that option exists. The Paragon images are just a little over 50% of the original.
With Paragon you can do a backup outside of Windows but I have never done this and although I restore full images once a week I have NEVER had a problem. I get the same machine back that I imaged, every time. It works perfectly from within Windows so again I can skip the recovery disk.
Regards Alex
With Acronis, you can boot from their program CD ( no need to install the program on your computer) and run both back and restore operations. I do this all the time.
If you create the Recovery Media Builder on one version of Paragon, then you update Paragon, do you have to recreate the Recovery Media Builder on flash drive or CD? Does the Recovery Media Builder only need to be done once?
23-Sep-2011
Hi Jean,
From my experience with Macrium Reflect I would say I used the same media for three years +, so it survived updates. I have now moved to Paragon so I am not sure about the situation but what I would say that creating the recovery media is very, very easy. Your program will do all the work. You do not have to search for files, just select âBurn recovery Diskâ or something similar. You just need a CD or flash drive.
Regards Alex
Hi again Jean,
In Paragon the option is found under Tools/Recovery Media Builder
The program will also ask you if you wish to do this when you first start to use it as will Macrium.
It will then open a very simple Wizard to guide you through.
Regards Alex
After making your restore/boot cd, be sure and try using it to be sure you can restore your image. Both Paragon and Macrium would not access my images on a external HD. EaseUS Todo and Windows 7 backup work however.
23-Sep-2011
One comment asked about the ability to create the backup from the rescue CD. I do not know about Paragon, but I do know that PING (freeware) works completely from a CD. You burn the ISO and that is it. Nothing is installed on you hard drive. Copying and restoring is done exclusively from the CD. I have done 32 bit XP and WIN7 backups and restorations using PING. I agree with Glenn P that it is best to do the copy with Windows dormant. Clonezilla is another tool that works like PING except for me Clonezilla is too confusing. Try PING if, like me, you have a need to do an image copy with Windows closed.
you should review the âeaseus todoâ software for backup and recovery which is available from http://www.easeustodo.com. it is free, has all requirements of modern backup and can also create a emergency disk/iso file/usb booting. it is just wonderful. you can in fact create a dos/linux based emergency or even a more advanced winpe media ifyou have have installed atk from microsoft. try it and tell us. i am using this software for the last 2 years and am at present using easeus todo ver 3.1.
Hi paleolith,
Ia m not sure that I understand the reluctance to make an image with Windows open as I must have made approximately 100 images this way without a single problem on restore.Nothing was missing or corrupt (image verification will show you this) and my machine always behaves as it did at the time I made the image. For me the advantage is the speed and convenience of not having to use the CD and being able to use my machine whilst the back up is in progress.
Have you had problems doing it this way or is it just a gut feeling and distrust that makes you want to be out of Windows when you make an image ? If the latter is the case then I can only say that it does work how the program writers intend it to.
Regards Alex.
Hi Leo,
Thanks for a very informative article/video.
I have , in the last couple of days, started a trial with this backup program, but I am doing a Differential backup. In your video and notes you refer to the absence of the Incremental option, and later you add to that Differential.
I wonder if there are different versions for different countries â I am in Australia.
In my case, with the Advanced box in the left pane expanded I see the choice of Differentail backup, and this is what I have been using.
(I took a screen shot of the expanded Advanced box, and of the log, but this wonât paste here, so I canât show it.)
I will run this as a daily schedule for about a month and then complete my test by restoring to a separate internal hard drive.
Hi Dean,
I am in England and I too have the option to make a differential (but not incremental) image.
I think Leoâs knowledge of anything âComputerâ is encyclopaedic and I am an avid fan of his common sense easy to understand articles. In this case I think however that he possibly did not explore all the options that Paragon offers.As well as the differential image he also missed that it is possible to restore the C drive without using any external media. Paragon will simply ask for permission to reboot and then complete the restore without the use of a CD or flash drive.
To be fair to Leo I think he uses Acronis so is not too familier with Paragon.
Regards Alex.
23-Sep-2011
Hi Leo, Thanks for the turorial. It is pretty comrehensive. I have made a similar one for free Macrium which might be interesting in the context ( http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html?ltr=I )
I noticed that your screen capture is pretty fuzzy. That seems to be a problem with embedded videos. Thatâs why I always post the direct link (in my case on Vimeo) with the embedding. That seems to work better.
For high quality capture, I use the free version of Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 Screen Capture ( http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Encoder4_Overview.aspx ). That one produces the very best quality I have seen. The downside is that the free version allows you only 10 minutes per shot. But that is OK for me because after 10 minutes I usually need a break anyhow. I then paste the pĂeces together with WLMM.
Another downside is that after recording, you have to encode the piece to get .wmv output. That requires a lot of muscle. It is OK on my i7, but even the Q6600 struggles. You have to figure 1 minute (i7) to 4 minutes (2.5GHz duo core) per recorded minute for the encoding. But the results are really splendid.
23-Sep-2011
@Dean
Hereâs an article on Ask Leo explaining the difference between incremental and differential backups.
http://ask-leo.com/whats_an_incremental_backup.html
I Asked:
âSo â does either Paragon or Acronis offer backup entirely from the CD, with Windows inactiveâŠ?
Leo replied:
(1) âI believe that both doâŠâ: Could you kindly find out for sure, please? It would be truly nasty to buy the product â on your say-so! â and then find out that it didnât do what you said it did!
(2) âBut Windows added support to make live full backups a reality some time agoâŠâ: Exactly how long ago is âsome time agoâ? I have Windows XP Professional SP3 (and regardless, I STILL donât trust Shadow Copy)!
23-Sep-2011
Hi Leo,
I am sorry if my post seemed to criticise your article unfairly. That
was never my intention. I wanted to point out to other potential users
that the Free version of Paragon does allow you to restore the whole
of C drive without the use of recovery media. You had cast some doubt
on this and I wanted to clarify the point. It is the way I choose to
use Paragon but I have also made a recovery CD just in case. In fact
it was one of the reasons I went over to Paragon from Macrium which
will not allow the restoration of the whole of C drive without the use
of recovery media. The other reason was the speed of restoration. With
Paragon I can put an image on in just thirteen minutes whereas Macrium
would take just short of half an hour.
Regards Alex
New installation of 32-bit Vista on Gateway FX Desktop. Installed Paragon B&R Advanced 2011. Cannot create recovery CD. Select the option and nothing happens. I have reinstalled, turned off AV, etc. Any ideas?
29-Nov-2011
to L. Malinofsky
the most possible reason is a third-party burning software which interferes with paragon drivers, try to temporarily disable or even uninstall if any (eg. Nero) and see if the issue presists, btw here is comparison review of Acronis True Image 2013 vs Paragon Backup and Recovery 12 Home http://www.acroniscoupon.info/acronis-true-image-2013-vs-paragon-backup-recovery-12-home.html it may help you decide which backup solution suites best for you