For the past 26 years, I've used one program and one program ONLY for all my C:\ backups and Drive Clones.
That one program was not written in the Soviet Union, or RED China, but in New Zealand, in 1997.
The name of that Backup/Restore program is "GHOST". Originally, in '97, it came on a single 3.5" Floppy Disk. That's where I first met it.
Shortly thereafter, the program was bought by 'Symantec' Corp. They modified the original program so that it could work with NTFS drives and files. That was the last of the DOS Bootable versions. And, that's where I am at today...."Ghost 11.5" is DOS bootable from any media that can boot a PC. I have it still on 3.5" floppy disks, CD's, Flash Drives and even one SD Memory Card.
Here on my Win-11/Pro/64 PC, I'm booting Ghost with a Flash Drive.
Why boot into DOS? Well, that keeps Windows and all it's warts and blemishes out of the process. In fact, Ghost will back up almost any disk that is not damaged. It doesn't care if it's DOS, Windows, Linux, Server, or just a data disk with no OS on it at all.
I've even backed up HD's where the OS was so corrupted that it wouldn't even boot up the PC.
When I want to just back up my data files, I run a batch file, that uses XCOPY to backup all my data files to a 128GB Flash Drive.
XCOPY is programmed to only back up files that are new or that have been changed since the last backup. That keeps the process, quick and clean. That data backup only takes a minute or two. And XCOPY, in a Batch File, runs just fine, even from within Windows 11.
Whereas, A typical Ghost backup using FAST Compression, takes about 20 minutes, from SSD to another SSD.
In years of computing, I've had many HD crashes, but, I've never lost any critical data. My backup scheme has always saved the day for me.
Cheers Mates
TM
PS: To address a concern, voiced by one member,,,, in 26 years I've never had a Ghost Image File fail me.
If I have any concern that my backup image file may not be 100% good, I can always run a "Check" operation, which totally
confirms the integrity of the file.
Back in the days when I ran mechanical HD's. I'd do a Ghost backup of my C partition and then do a Restore of that newly created file, which in effect gave me one heck of a Defrag. (Every file, totally contiguous, end to end on the HD, with no spaces in between= Zero Fragmentation) But now with the SSD's, defragmenting a drive is no longer done.