I have several SSDs in my box, the maker of them suggests the same method you did, seems it is better for the SSDs. I have Acronis TI on a USB, does a great job.
Yes this one is surprisingly good.. You can run it from PE, within Windows, from a USB under Windows..
Dear Atari800XL, Many thanks for your test - a lot of useful info: speed and compression is both important aspect of an imaging app. Your test agrees with my previous tests. Acronis and Terabyte are the best ones IMO. Drive Snapshot is a bit surprising (pleasantly) for me. I tested its older version before but the speed and compression were both inferior to Acronis and Terabyte. Seems Drive Snapshot improved a lot in the new version v1.43. I'll give it a spin soon.
I have Acronis True Image 2014. I set it up for Incremental backups on my C:/ system drive. This backup goes onto my NAS. Works great, surprised more people don't back up with this method..
I have been making my own pe for a while. If you can't be bothered to try that, The oven is worth a visit. Chris leads a project there with support from a lot of good folk. There is a thing called winbuilder which will make a pretty decent pe for you, though you do need the installation media. There are some big issues with win8.1 pese it makes, win7 pese is a much more finished product.( I have my own build of win 8.1 x64 pe, which has fewer issues, but still is not perfect. ) Paragon is relatively straightforward to put in. Many of the imaging programs are. Aomei is the best free one, fast and lots of features and a good UI. It just needs one registry entry for ambakdrv.sys to create images, though it restores fine without it. I have been aware of Drive Snapshot for some time, and the new version supports efi and gpt, finally. Unfortunately, there isn't a free version.
Yes, it is quite surprising how few people make any kind of backups at all. Acronis is very large and intrusive, it isn't free either. It does the job fine, though. For most people, there are other imaging programs which will do all they need, free ones too. ( There is a cut down Acronis of sorts for WD and Seagate which was mentioned earlier , still a huge beast, and only does the very basics. Other free versions offer a lot more )
The pe extra package thing they sell is not too big, but the installed version is. I expect most people will want the installed version and matching boot media.
I'm not sure if a "how to" is needed. Just run Win81SE82_Builder.exe, set sources location and press play is enough?
Yes, Iirc Chris has a kind of default setup so you don't need to fiddle with the options. The major problem with 8.1 se is you can't run refresh/reset for the default admin login style he use. Kind of defeats the purpose. There is an alternative build which runs as system ( i.e regular pe ). That is much better, but also has a few issues. I needs SIB for any kind of explorer interface, and even then the taskbar and a few other things don't work. More of an issue, there is a big hang with control panel and network center on that. My own hand built 8.1 pe x64 does not suffer from that. Unfortunately, there are so many differences between the winbuilder build and mine, I haven't been able to identify what is causing that problem with winbuilder. Chris hasn't yet been to find out either, as far as I know.
I posted earlier Chris heads the winbuilder project. I agree with Atari, it is a very good project and definitely worth using if you don't want all the hassle of making your own winpe. SIB is Start is Back - very well known here, I think.
Dear CEW, Would you please elucidate a bit in detail how to add Paragon HDM onto Win8.1SE? Yes as Atari800xl mentioned, I use Win8.1SE and it surely is a great piece of boot media. Regards, oliverjia
One way is to mount the boot.wim which Paragon BMB has created and copy the files from there to "\Win8.1SE_2014-01-30\Workbench\Common\Win8.1SE\AdditionalFiles", but BMB maybe adds something into registry which makes things complicated
I put additional software on the USB itself, not in any ISO file but just in a new folder. Terabyte and Paragon probably has dependencies which needs to be in System32 folder as well, so they are not so portable as Drive Snapshot I tried CEW's version of Win8.1SE and it works well for me (Although showing 8.1 Enterprise watermark on desktop) Edit: Noticed that Terabyte provides a tool "PE Builder Plugin Installer" which can be used to add IFW to Win81.SE. Now I love them even more
I tried to run something in Win8.1SE and it told me that I need to log on as Administrator. But build type was "OS in Ram" and the description says "Log on as Administrator account with the full install.wim hives". I go this wrong??
I tested AOMEI backupper 1.6 on a Win8.1SE on a GPT/UEFI computer with secure boot today. A bit disappointed. The backup/recovery process completed "successfully" however upon reboot, Windows had to go through a "diagnosis" process for some seconds then rebooted again. This time the reboot is normal. So apparently there is at least something not right during backup/restore. A second point is that AOMEI will backup each partition as a separate image file and when you restore it, you only can restore it one by one, there is no way to restore all GPT partitions + C partition at one time. So it appears AOMEI is not completely supporting UEFI with secure boot.