Has anyone used Clonezilla for Windows 10 backup

The title pretty well says it all... If you have used Clonezilla, what were your results?

 

@NK7Z

Works perfectly fine. The only real caveat is that if you want to restore your Clonezilla image to another drive, it must be at least the same size or bigger.

Great for backing up just about any operating system, too.

 

As per Randy's comment, Clonezilla is ideal for bare metal backup and restore before the operating system is loaded. You should also be backing up important files and data separately using whatever archive method you prefer. Use Clonezilla monthly and archive your data as needed.

 

Warning. Clonezilla is a great sector for sector copy of a hard drive. If you're restoring to the original hard drive, it *should* work find. Should. <----- Should. <----- It used to work perfectly fine for me under XP. However, be warned, the newer versions of windows keep track of hard drive serial numbers now and cloning to a new hard drive (because the original had a hardware failure) may not work because windows will now see a different hard drive serial number.

Not absolutely sure about this, but I wouldn't rely solely on Clonezilla for backup today because of this.

 

We used that on a secure military installation....worked flawlessly. If at all possible, use the defaults. Don't use the EXPERT mode unless you really are an expert!

 

As per Guy's comment... allegedly, supposedly, presumably you should be able to clone, upgrade, copy to another hard drive as long as the original Win10 computer has been activated and this information has been stored and accessible by the MSoft mothership which is... I'll be nice and say "interesting". My dad lives in the sticks and has dial-up which barely works (Guy he lives just outside of Bettie and I always dread having to help him when he has issues).

 

I have not tried it. But if you use Win 10 BitLocker, I would not trust being able to recover it.

 

I've never had a problem restoring an image to a different hard drive on either of my two Dell Inspiron 1525 laptops I did that on. I replaced two hard drives with 500 GB models where the laptops came with 350 GB ones. Both were original Vista that I had later replaced with OEM Windows 10 and a couple of years later swapped out with the larger drives and restored the images to them, each to its own laptop. I used Macrium Reflect free version to do the imaging and restores.

Several years ago I moved an image of Windows XP to a larger hard drive on a PC that I still use as my "lab" PC because it has MS Office 2003 and has parallel and serial ports. Macrium reflect did not allow that and I used Clonezilla to do it.

If any problems with activation are experienced, call Microsoft on the phone for activation.

Ted, KX4OM

 

So why we are on the subject...

Does the built in Windows 10 system backup work ???

Backup seems to work, Well it says successful, But will Restore work ?

Has anyone tried it to restore a system ?

 

ZDNet.com did an article in 2015 about Microsoft changing the way it controlled activation of Windows 10. It shifted to an online database of licenses attached to specific machines. Here is a link to the article:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-quietly-rewrites-its-activation-rules-for-windows-10/

At the end of the article, they explain how Microsoft ties the license to the hardware. Here is a quote that gives the short version:

"Microsoft doesn't provide details of how it calculates that hardware hash, but upgrades of system components such as a video card or a hard drive won't normally trigger a reactivation. If that happens, a quick call to the activation line will resolve the issue, often without any human contact required, in minutes."

"The one exception is a motherboard replacement, which will inevitably cause the Software Licensing Management utility to recognize the device as a new PC and require reactivation, typically over the phone. A motherboard upgrade, even if you reuse storage, video, memory, and a case, is considered a new PC."

An exception to the previous paragraph is that if you have purchased a Retail license instead of an OEM license, you can deactivate your license for the old machine and then activate it for a new machine. OEM versions, whether they came installed with a new PC or bought directly from Micro Center or Amazon or eBay vendors are stuck forever to one PC. I have not confirmed it that applies to the $39.99 Retail license that I recently bought from PC World though.

More detail on reactivation from HowToGeek:

https://www.howtogeek.com/444351/how-to-reactivate-windows-10-after-a-hardware-change/


Ted, KX4OM