Copy to or Command Promt - these are the best always. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PS: Do you have enabled in the right click context menu (Win8-Win10) Copy To Folder and Move To Folder?
I like the built-in System Imaging for full drive or partition backups, and simply DOS copies (copy and xcopy commands) for files and folder. DOS commands (think batch files), coupled with a scheduled task, puts immediately usable files and folders on the [several] external drives (and internal data drives) of my choosing on my schedule. With them being simple DOS copies, they do not require any sort of “restoration” to be usable. With one external drive being a 64GB SD card, I can immediately read my most critical data from another Windows machine and in many cases my Mac. [FONT=&]Not the “elegant” solution afforded by true backup software, but it’s worked for me for many years and the impact on my system performance is virtually nil[/FONT]
my personal favorite is ZPAQ usage examples: zpaq.exe a backup.zpaq c:\Folder\To\Backup or zpaq.exe a backup.zpaq c:\Users -not *\appdata\ -not *\Downloads\ -not *\%username%\ntuser.* or zpaq.exe a docs.zpaq c:\ -only *.pdf -only *.doc -only *.docx -only *.txt
Aside the classic imaging SW like ones from Acronis or Paragon, one of the most seamless is the background backup done by Windows Home server 2011 and his brother Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. (it still works perfectly with w10 clients) The same easy way is available on later servers if the Essentials role is installed (and configured). It's the kind of "set and forget it" things, rarely seen on MS products.