The most important thing that hasn't been mentioned is verifying the image after creating...
Nothin suxx more than an hour and a half restoring a bad image...
Yes. Well said! Macrium option:
After backup, check log:
I was backing up a 120 GB SSD with about 80 GB of data (ignoring swap and hibernate files), onto a 4 TB USB3 external drive. Macrium image compression set to 'medium' (default). An unverified backup takes about 10 minutes, and the verification adds about 6 minutes to that.
This is the part of a backup process that many people forget about, often to their cost when disaster strikes. A successful recovery from trouble needs these things to be true:
1. You made a backup.
2. The backup completed.
3. The backup is a valid one.
4. The backup didn't get lost or damaged.
5. You have the means to restore an image or copy.
6. You know how to do a restore.
You can manage (1) quite simply. Have a schedule, do the backups. Ensure (2) is satisfied by observing the backup process and any alerts it creates, and looking for a backup file of appropriate date, time and size. You can achieve (3) by setting any 'verify' options the backup app provides and watching for the success message or log entry. I deal with (4) by using 3 different locations for backup images - a NAS, a USB 3 external drive, a SATA internal drive, and rotating the location each time. If one or even two backup drive(s) go down, I've got a good backup to use. I manage (5) by having a bootable medium (actually 2, a bootable USB pen drive and a bootable CD, and I've tested both). Without (6), even if you do the preceding things, you are, effectively stuffed, so it is important to take the time to actually do a restore, even if you don't really need to.
I have read disaster stories where mainframes, minis, or servers fail, and the admins say "no worries! we've done rotating backups onto tape cartridges!" and found, when attempting a restore, that the tape machine has been borked for months and they have a whole bunch of religiously rotated blank tapes.
I should add that I have successfully made an image backup of a drive, and then restored that image to a different drive. I installed an SSD that way to a laptop.
