I've never been great at doing backups, only really copying important data on a fairly ad hoc manner. I could certainly do better.

My main computer runs Windows 10 and has a 500 GB SSD. I have lots of music, photos, videos etc. sat on an old laptop and various external drives.

My intention going forward is to keep the OS, all my programs and data files requiring fast access on the SSD and having a large mirrored external drive for rest of the data.

Some of my programs have fairly complex (for me) installations with lots of plugins so I assume that I will want to make a regular full back up of that which includes a disk image. The external data drive will only alter occasionally (addition or deletion of files).

My thoughts are to do a weekly backup of the SSD using either Windows File History, Back Up and Restore (Win 7), or the third party program PARAGON Backup & Recovery which seems highly rated.

As there seems no point in continually rewriting everything on the data drive, I was thinking of using something like FreeFileSync to adjust the mirrored drive weekly.

Firstly, does this seem like a reasonable solution or are there better ones? I don't think I need incremental backups, and can make more regular copies of anything really important manually.

I'm not sure how restore works with a disk image if the worst happens. Can I just boot from the backup?

If I use PARAGON, I'm offered various different types of Disk Image (.pvhd - Paragon Image, .vhd - MS Virtual PC Image etc.) I have no idea what these mean or which I should choose.

Grateful for any thoughts on the above.

Ed

In the recent Windows 11 thread, DaveRo commented:

When my wife's machine was upgraded to Win 10 I continued to use 'Win 7 backup' (in addition to File History) to backup monthly to a local drive. But after a recent reinstall it said that it was only capable of restoring backups but not making new ones. Anybody using 'Win 7 backup' to a local disk on Win 10?

It appears to work for me, Dave. I'm using Windows 10 Home (Build 19042.1110).