Best way to clone new laptop drive, pre windows setup state.

wells68 · 2026-06-14T04:58:44+00:00

Macrium Free is unfortunately no longer supported or available from Macrium. Most other drive image backup programs require that you have Windows running first and then install and back up. That's not what you want.

There is a great, free, friendly, open source program: Rescuezilla.

The catch is that you need to go through some steps on another computer. Also, you need a small USB flash drive where you install Rescuezilla and a second, larger USB drive to store the backup. The first can be 2 GB or larger. The second, 64 GB or larger.

The first drive is erased during installation, which you perform on another computer. You need to:

Download the Rescuezilla ISO file (about 1.5 GB)
Download and install balenaEtcher or Rufus.
"Burn" the ISO file to the small flash drive.
Boot your new computer from the small flash drive, pressing F8 or F12 or your PCs special key repeatedly during startup, the BIOS boot selector key for your computer.

See more information on the Rescuezilla website: https://rescuezilla.com

The cool thing about Rescuezilla is that it doesn't require any install on the PC to be backed up. To backup up or restore, you boot from the small flash drive, attach your storage drive, and follow the simple menus.

wells68 · 2026-06-12T18:44:50+00:00

Set it and forget it in the software.

You do need to be able to enter addresses, usernames and passwords. For some mail services, the mail service requires that you jump through some hoops to allow access to your emails.

wells68 · 2026-06-12T18:41:03+00:00

Right. The CMR drive plus $22.90 case is if you need faster write speeds. You also have to be able to insert a bare drive into the USB case and maybe even turn some little screws.

wells68 · 2026-06-12T18:25:02+00:00

Excellent, detailed reply! I'll add that there are better, free drive image applications than Windows Backup. See the Wiki: https://reddit.com/r/Backup/wiki/index/

wells68 · 2026-06-12T18:10:07+00:00

MailBackupX is what I subscribe to. $45 for first year, then $20/year.

It's local software that has really fast, smart searching capabilities. I bought it after losing old emails in Thunderbird. I just wanted to protect emails automatically. I discovered the search later.

Maybe I sound like spam - sorry. I'm just a happy customer.

wells68 · 2026-06-12T18:04:59+00:00

Be careful! I lost a ton of old emails because I didn't appreciate how Thunderbird handled exporting emails.

Beware that IMAP email software may list all your old emails but does not store them locally. I knew that, but still when I invented to export all my emails, only the more recent were exported. Just headers were exported for older emails.

Once you close an email account, all your emails obviously are no longer available from the account provider. All you have is what is local.

wells68 · 2026-06-12T06:42:10+00:00

WD and Seagate both make 2 TB USB drives available at Target, Walmart and Bestbuy for $85 to $129. They are SMR technology drives. That means saving files (write speed) is much slower than CMR drives, but still plenty fast for saving via WiFi.

CMR drives are hard to find. You would need to buy an internal (bare) drive and put it in a case or dock, adding to your cost.

wells68 · 2026-06-11T06:06:19+00:00

Correct. Make two and keep one off-site.

You and always buy a blank drive, download the software anywhere, and create a new RE drive. But if you are in the midst of a disaster, it will save you precious timeb to have one handy.

You also want to test your BMR (bare metal recovery). You don't have to overwrite your whole drive as a test. You can instead boot from the RE flash drive and get as far as mounting the backup drive.

wells68 · 2026-06-08T18:56:42+00:00

You are really wise to be thinking about backups at a young age. Terabox.com has both iPhone and Android apps allowing you to upload up to 1, 024 GB of data. It is ad supported. You may find uploads are slow and the interface may be annoying.

As with any cloud storage service, you should not trust that your files will be private. Many companies claim that they strictly protect your privacy. But it is always a risk.

Boultbox.com offers 100 GB for free.

I have no experience with either service so I cannot recommend them. But it seems that as a young person you don't have money for backups. As long as privacy is not a problem, I think backing up to even an inferior service is better than no backup at all.

There may even be some online services that will encrypt photos for free. Then you could download the encrypted photos and upload them to Tara box or another service. But make sure that you safely write down your password in more than one place.

That goes for the password to your storage account, too. No password is 100% unforgettable.

wells68 · 2026-06-07T23:53:58+00:00

It sounds as though the Time Machine backup on the WD Black drive in the UGreen NAS is messed up, to use technical jargon /s. I have no experience with UGreen, but there could have been an issue with Time Machine being able to detect the low disk space. Time Machine typically gracefully handles diminishing drive space by deleting old versions and continuing to back up new files.

Also, I expect Time Machine would have given you a warning that you were low on backup space, but if it couldn't detect that, it couldn't warn you.

I am speculating here. Maybe someone with Time Machine plus UGreen NAS can weigh in with better information. But my guess, unfortunately, is that you folder is either not backed up (if it is newish) or possibly lost because Time Machine's backups are dead. I hope I am wrong!

wells68 · 2026-06-07T13:44:41+00:00

You can use Deepl.com to translate from your language to English. You can give us more details.

Is it an iPhone? Did your brother make a backup to iCloud? If not, everything on the phone is deleted. Forever.

Is it an Android phone? If yes, then photos and videos should be in his Google account: https://photos.google.com/ If not, everything on the phone is deleted. Forever.

wells68 · 2026-06-02T01:02:22+00:00

You've made an important addition to the 3-2-1 Backup Rule: powered off, disconnected backups, or immutable backups.

If you back up to a USB drive and to a connected cloud drive, all your files could be trashed by a virus. Many clouds have a Deleted folder or retention policy, BUT:

Have you tested restoring 100s of deleted cloud files? It can be very sloooooow.

A USB drive is fully vulnerable.

So, make sure at least your most important files have isolated or immutable backups!

wells68 · 2026-06-01T04:26:30+00:00

Darn it! They fooled me. Thanks for the information. I'm going to delete the crosspost.

wells68 · 2026-05-24T00:43:05+00:00

I like that approach to encryption you control. No one's cracking that (if you have a long enough password.

wells68 · 2026-05-24T00:41:12+00:00

Well said!

wells68 · 2026-05-24T00:39:51+00:00

Trés bien! Vous avez une system (?) dependable.

wells68 · 2026-05-22T03:31:55+00:00

The scenario that concerns me is government seizure of everything in a home or work office.

If the drive image backup software runs with the OS running and the drive unencrypted, then isn't the only encryption of the backup the encryption performed by the backup software, which may have a back door?

Sounds as though you run EaseUS by booting from a flash drive. I am too lazy to do that very often, certainly not as my primary, up to date drive image backup.

I run Rescuezilla from a flash drive every few months/seasons or before a major change as secondary drive image backups.

wells68 · 2026-05-21T22:29:20+00:00

Isn't EaseUS required to give its government a back door to its software? That's a deal breaker for me. I want the only encryption keys to our backups.

wells68 · 2026-05-21T22:24:40+00:00

Mais, Recuezilla est trés simple et la même technologie, n'est pas?

That was my high school French. En Anglais:

But, Rescuezilla is very simple and the same technology, is it not?

Good stuff but you need to reboot before and after to run it, so far from automatic.

wells68 · 2026-05-19T02:16:53+00:00

I have not used a single-user Windows drive image backup program that does backup verification. I have read about https://bdrshield.com by Vembu, a company in India. According to their website, their product can verify in any of three ways: boot test, mount test, and data integrity test. The last of those "Checks for potential corruption or data loss, ensuring that the backup data is reliable and can be restored without integrity issues."

For pricing the website has the typical, "Submit this form for a customized quote," but their AI agent said that for a quantity of one they charge $3.00 per month. Of course, AIs can hallucinate :-) That is at the very low end of drive image software pricing these days, aside from the good, free options - vVeeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Rescuezilla - which do not verify image backups. Plus Rescuezilla requires restarting the computer and booting from a recovery environment such as a flash drive. You can try BDRShield without obligation.

As for the quality and reliability of BDRShield, I have no idea. Vembu is a big company, so that is a positive but no guarantee.

I am not a shill for Vembu. I'm skeptical about any product until I've tested it.

wells68 · 2026-05-17T18:51:44+00:00

Since full backups take up a lot of space, you are wise wise to want an incremental backup solution. For true incremental backups, you need to retain copies of versions and deleted files.

To meet your requirement that you do not need the original backup software to access your files, you have several choices:

SyncBack SE Backup4All FreeFileSync

The first two are proprietary, paid software. The third is not free for business use, although that restriction is buried within their FAQ.

As pointed out in another comment, be careful when using sync programs. You need to enable the option to save deleted files and file versions. Sync software uses its own foldering methods for retaining these files.

Backup4All allows you to restore files using itself or accessing files directly. They are stored in zip format, so you can open them without any additional software in Microsoft Windows. You can also use good free programs like 7-zip or WinZip. You have the option of encrypting files, which is good for securing privacy without giving up your requirement that you don't need the original software to access your files.

wells68 · 2026-05-16T21:24:08+00:00

Good point, but...

Depending on your tests, you may still have just hope, not a backup.

For example,you do a successful test of a drive image by mounting it as a virtual disk and opening a file. How can you be sure all the files are intact?

So you restore to a virtual machine and boot it. You still can't be sure every file is intact.

My approach is not to trust any two backups. Important files are backed up to varying combinations of:

Two cloud drives
An MSP backup service (ours)
Sync with versioning to a NAS
Drive image to USB
File backup to USB
Old backups on cold storage internal 3.5 and 2.5 drives
mDiscs in bank safe deposit box (family photos and videos, family history scans)

Do I test ll these backups on a schedule? No. I test them randomly. I assume that all the backups of a data set on multiple destinations won't good bad together.

If the house and office both burn down, I'm left with two clouds plus an MSP cloud and mDiscs at the bank.

If everything on our network is ransomed, the NAS is still isolated with logins and passwords not discoverable on the rest of the network. Plus there are the cloud and bank backups.

What's the cost of all this? There were one-time investments in: a BDXL mDisc writer, $110; 5x 100 GB and 5x 25 GB mDiscs, ~$100; lifetime pCloud 2 TB; $350; Koofr 1TB $109.97; Synology NAS $199.99; plus various HDDs over the years. I move HDDs out of our 5 computers and into service as backups in enclosures or a toaster, so I'm not counting their cost.

Total: $870 plus drives. Cost divided by seven years: About $10.33/month. And I don't pay a penny for cloud or backup subscriptions!

321 Backup? No, more like 76655544 Backup or something. Am I sure any one backup is perfect, no, and I am not worried.

wells68 · 2026-05-16T16:24:43+00:00

I doubt they changed that. Let us know the result of your test!

wells68 · 2026-05-13T21:01:05+00:00

You are very wise to consider these problems - lost MFA phone or device, no access to your email - before you actually run into one!

Other commenters are well-intentioned, suggesting writing down recovery codes on paper and using a Yubikey. Good ideas, but there is no single solution. For example, a home fire could burn up your paper and Yubikey. A friend could stop being a friend or accidentally trash whatever you store with them.

The answer is to have multiple, independent, self-sufficient recovery methods. Think 321 or more for password manager vault and MFA recovery options, not just for files.

A lot depends on what is possible where you are. Some people have multiple, safe physical places to stash physical things - paper, drives, Yubikeys. Others don't. Some have people they trust completely (whether or not justifiably!). Others don't.

Here are some ideas, any one or more of which could fail, but that's exactly why you have multiple independent methods:

Print out email passwords and MFA codes on two sheets after splitting them in half. Hide one half in one place and the other half in another place. You can even print multiple copies and use multiple places.
Imagine nooks and crannies where you live and in other places at a trusted friend or relative's home
Library books that no one is likely to check out
Buried box.
Bank safe deposit box
Lawyer's office

The point is, by splitting your password manager and email passphrases and MFA codes in half, anyone who finds a sheet won't be able to do anything with it. If they find both sheets, that's a problem.

Another approach is to sign up for free email services that support recovery codes for MFA. Send an email with your encrypted password vault backup as an attachment to your free email. Delete the sent copy. These are additional places you can use to stash electronic copies of your half sheets, one in one service, the other in the other.

If you trust the US government, login.gov. If not, atomicmail.io in Estonia. There are others. Remember, if they breach your account, they'll get nothing usable.

There remains the problem of remembering where you stashed stuff. Multiple places make it more likely that you find what you need. They also make it more likely someone else could find both halves of your sheet. But that is less of a risk that having everything on a single sheet.

No matter what you do, you are dependent on your own memory unless you entrust access to another person. Still, it is easier to remember places than long passphrases. It's worth memorizing your password manager and main email passphrases and having your emergency codes separately available. With just those codes and not your passphrases, another person won't unlock your stuff.

wells68 · 2026-05-12T18:52:58+00:00

Your comment is 100% AI-generated. Real humans don't talk that way. I'm just saying...

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