Please help me find the best method to back up 5 drives to one 4 TB external

[zagaldus]

So I have A LOT of very important data and over the years I've had to purchase new drives as I ran out of space naturally. Now I have a total of 5 drives and I've been pulling my hair out over this for a few years now, trying to figure out how exactly I could do this.

This is what my system looks like as far as hard drives go:

Figured an image would be better than trying to write out every drive, easier for everyone else.

So a couple of these drives have an OS installed on them (I would install windows onto one drive, run out of space then had to purchase new drives and do that again but now I just run off of the main SSD drive's OS then add HDDs to store data.

And I would like to just back everything up, all the drives including the OSes, pretty much like a clone of all the drives so in case one drive fails I can be back up and running again without having to reinstall a new OS and try to configure it how it was before with settings and whatnot that I spent so much time doing in the past, installing drivers and doing registry edits for specific programs and files, etc.

I just don't want to be installing an OS again, I want to back everything up so I have a mirror image clone of each drive so if I need to recover a drive that failed all I have to do is buy a new drive and move the backup to it and I don't have to worry about installing a new OS or any of that.

The drives total about 3.5 TB so I have a 4 TB drive that I'd like to backup all the drives to. I'd like to just copy all the system files and data for each drive, each partition to the 4 TB drive then if one of the drives fails I can just recover that respective drive's backup partitions on to a fresh drive without having to reinstall OS or anything like that.

I'm looking for a step by step solution for this challenge I'm facing including what backup product you would suggest doing it with (hopefully there's a free solution but I'll buy it if it will solve my problem and works properly)

I'm mainly leaning towards cloning as that seems to be the quickest method to just backup everything in its entirety which is what I'm looking for but I'm also constantly downloading more music, changes constantly made to my data and I have a whole lot of drives so cloning each drive one by one is going to be pretty painful doing that constantly. Would be great if there is some way I can backup the system AND data files for all of my drives and also be able to quickly update those already made backups. Also I'm really new to backing up data so I'm going to need to have this explained to me like I'm stupid so I can fully understand everything I'm doing - always avoided image backups as it seemed so tedious and technical, like it might take more time than cloning but that might be the route I may have to take.

I know this might be pretty complicated and it could get even more complicated and messy but I'm willing to send some sort of 'donation' to whoever can take the time to find a foolproof solution to this for me so I can just be done with this once and for all and have my valuable data finally backed up!

 

[USAFRet]

1. Your D, E, and F "partitions" do NOT need nor should have drive letters.

2. Need a better idea of which of these are partitions, and which are physical drives.
Please show us a screencap of your current Disk Management window.

2. Images, not clones.
The clone of a single drive will consume the totality of another drive.

We'll go into detail on procedures after a better look at exactly what is going on with your drives.

 

[zagaldus]

1. Your D, E, and F "partitions" do NOT need nor should have drive letters.

2. Need a better idea of which of these are partitions, and which are physical drives.
Please show us a screencap of your current Disk Management window.

2. Images, not clones.
The clone of a single drive will consume the totality of another drive.

We'll go into detail on procedures after a better look at exactly what is going on with your drives.

Yeah the D 'Recovery' one I just created when I first did that free upgrade to Windows 10 and I think there were some minor issues to where I needed somewhere to install the Windows 10 installation/repair so I created that to store it but I don't even use it. I tried doing 'delete volume' in disk management earlier for this 'D' partition and I was warned that it's currently in use. I was worried it might do some harm to my main drives and partitions so I didn't go any further and left it. But if you think it's safe to delete that 'D' partition even if it says it's in use please let me know and I'll proceed and delete that volume.

The E and F 'System Reserved' partitions I think were created on their own but I'm not 100% sure. What should I do to change those? I didn't know that was any serious issue. But I MIGHT have given those letters when I was seeing if I could just clone each volume partition by partition to the 4 TB drive that I think I was planning to add partitions for each drive. But then I ran into issues with Easeus not cloning the partitions properly in this scenario and giving me headaches doing this so I just stopped.

#2: Here is the screenshot of my disk management window

Or this should give a larger image: https://imgur.com/a/eOLvTjl

 

[USAFRet]

Right click on the E and F, and "Change or remove drive letter..."

For your actual question, your set up is not much different than mine. Multiple drives.
I don't, however have other OS's on the secondary drives.
No matter though.

How to:
On the new 4TB, create a folder for each physical drive.
Install Macrium Reflect. The free version is just fine
Run it, and create a full drive Image of each physical drive, to its own labeled folder on the 4TB. During this, you can also designate Incremental images for between when you do Full images, and a schedule of when, and how long to keep.
Repeat for each physical drive.

An Incremental image is whatever has changed since the last Incremental image.
The paid version of Macrium also does Differential images. All changes since the last Full image.

Each Image results in a single file for each drive. xxxxx.mrimage.

Overall folder structure:

Files for an individual drive.
Here, it is a 250GB SSD. 2 weeks worth of Full and Incremental only consumes 150GB space.
A single full clone would consume 250GB.
I can ressurect each of the drives individually, at the state they were at any point in the last two weeks.

One of the nice features of Macrium is that you can mount an Image as a drive letter, and read through it just as if it were a physical drive.

Need the copy of your term paper or resume from last week, before you messed it up? No problem. Mount that Image and retrieve that single file. No need to resurrect the entire clone or Image.


Read a little more in depth here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html

 

[USAFRet]

Also, in Macrium, create a Rescue USB or CD.
If your OS drive dies, you can boot from that, tell it where the Image is, and what new drive to apply it to.
Click Go, 20 mins later...your drive exactly as it was when you created that Image.

 

[zagaldus]

Thank you USAFRet, I'm going to try and start on this tonight.

And sharing your own backup procedure helps a lot but I'm going to really need to try it for myself to understand all of this better.

Going to send you a PM, I'm probably going to need a bit more help as I start on this.

 

[hang-the-9]

Here is what I would do in your case, since a large standard drive is not really expensive. Get the external for backups, get an internal for current data use. Copy your files (not just drive images, that is a bit of an overkill since when do you actually boot off those other drives) into the new large internal drive. You can make images of the drives to the external one if you want. Then remove the existing drives and stick them in a drive holder with a few moisture absorbing packets, put those on a shelf somewhere clean (not in a musky basement or an attic). You have a new drive for your files in one place, you a have the external as a backup, and you also have the original drives if either of those fail. And trust me, the chances of both main drive and backup going bad are not that low. If you really don't want to lose your data, having two backup locations or more is not unusual.

You can make an image of your primary drive if you want to restore it quickly if it fails or if you upgrade it again.

 

[zagaldus]

Also, in Macrium, create a Rescue USB or CD.
If your OS drive dies, you can boot from that, tell it where the Image is, and what new drive to apply it to.
Click Go, 20 mins later...your drive exactly as it was when you created that Image.

So I want to do what you suggested USAFRet but I've run into one roadblock before I begin.

I'd like to encrypt the external drive after I back up the files in case (god forbid) the drive is stolen the person isn't able to just hook it up to a new PC and have access to all of my sensitive data like website login information which I have A LOT of stored.

I have Truecrypt as something I could use for encryption but I'm just worried about any complications that may arise after backing up and encrypting the external hard drive that might get in the way of me recovering or updating the encrypted back up drive.

Could you give me some steps I might take to go about dealing with this situation? What would you do in my case to deal with these concerns?

Thank you for all the help you've provided so far.

 

[USAFRet]

Don't use TrueCrypt anymore. Broken, defunct, and several years out of any development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueCrypt
http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/

Use VeraCrypt instead.
https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html

 

[zagaldus]

Don't use TrueCrypt anymore. Broken, defunct, and several years out of any development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueCrypt
http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/

Use VeraCrypt instead.
https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html

Yeah I had VeraCrypt on my mind, seen some others talking about that one being superior.

When you get some time can you answer my other questions about the encryption?

 

[USAFRet]

Don't use TrueCrypt anymore. Broken, defunct, and several years out of any development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueCrypt
http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/

Use VeraCrypt instead.
https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html

Yeah I had VeraCrypt on my mind, seen some others talking about that one being superior.

When you get some time can you answer my other questions about the encryption?

You'd have to decrypt before any backup procedure.
You might be able to automate that process.
And then unmount after.

 

[zagaldus]

Don't use TrueCrypt anymore. Broken, defunct, and several years out of any development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueCrypt
http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/

Use VeraCrypt instead.
https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html

Yeah I had VeraCrypt on my mind, seen some others talking about that one being superior.

When you get some time can you answer my other questions about the encryption?

You'd have to decrypt before any backup procedure.
You might be able to automate that process.
And then unmount after.

Hey again USAFRet, thank you for all your speedy replies helping me so much with this. I had some questions about the backup process just to make sure I'm doing everything properly and not making any mistakes or missing anything.

So you think with macrium alone I might be able to automate this process to decrypt the hard drive before the backup procedures then unmount after? If so that would be great, if you find any info on that please do let me know. I'll have to look into that after I'm done with this first backup.

Last night I began backing up before I went to sleep. Seems like you have to manually back up each drive yourself at least for the first full backup so I'll have to do more of that tonight. But sadly it seems like I won't be able to do anything releated to incremental backups without purchasing the paid Macrium version. After I chose the source drive then the folder on the external that I'd like the backup image to be stored in, I had different choices like differential, etc. I just had to leave it at 'None' for now.

But his is my process right now for the first initial full backup of all my drives: Click 'Create a backup' > Select physical drive > Image this disk > Select destination folder > Next > On this backup plan template page if I try to select 'Incremental Backup Set' for example it tells me I can't use that with the free version or anything else incremental related so I just leave everything at default > Finish

Is that how I should be setting up my first initial full backup?

And also do you think I'm just going to have to go ahead and purchase the paid version to set up the incremental backup schedule later?

Is it okay for me to just do this first initial backup the way I have it above or should I buy the paid version now to make sure it's set up to do incremental backups? Like am I supposed to set it up to do incremental backups before the first full backup or can I set all that up later after I've done the full backup of all the drives and have the paid version?

 

[USAFRet]

The Free version does Full and Differential.
The Paid version adds Incrementals to the mix.

You can go with the Free for now, and add a paid license later if you choose.

Differential images are 'easier' to recover with, but take up more drive space.


I've not delved into VeraCrypt + Macrium, but this might be handy:
https://forum.macrium.com/Topic15717.aspx

 

[zagaldus]

You reply so fast man! No matter what day of the week it is I've got a quick response from you, I really appreciate that, you're a great moderator, definitely on top of things.

I know you only do incrementals yourself and your way of doing your backups looks good so I'd like to do it that way too so looks like I'm going to have to get the paid version after I'm done with this first backup.

My main backup external drive is 4 TB and just this first full backup of all my drives is going to take up about 3.5 TB of it so differential backups are probably out of the question especially seeing how I have to deal with them taking up more space, just seems like the least attractive option to me and you don't seem to use them yourself.

Thanks for that link I'm going to look at it right now.

 

[USAFRet]

If a single backup of your current data takes 3.5TB out of a 4TB drive, you're in for some pain going forward.

The Default Macrium settings as you left them will do Full + Differential or Incremental, repeating weekly or monthly, until you run out of drive space.

Which you already have. It will automatically delete earlier ones when it sees less than 5% free drive space.
You're already there.

 

[zagaldus]

*...well I do have another 2 TB external drive that I bought a while ago. I had so much data that that drive wasn't big enough but it still may be useless in this predicament I'm in now.

So basically I've got 3.5 TB of data total, one external 4 TB drive and a second external 2 TB drive.

What do you suggest I do? Will I need to buy like a 5-10 TB drive or something?

Also one little note about the 4 TB drive since something is telling me I should mention this - the 4 TB is a Western Digital Blue 4 TB internal drive placed in an enclosure - I did that because I love Western Digital Blue drives and probably a couple other reasons that I can't remember at the moment. But hopefully that's fine.

 

[USAFRet]

You can have some of it go to the 4TB, and some of it go to the 2TB.

 

[zagaldus]

You can have some of it go to the 4TB, and some of it go to the 2TB.

So these are all my drives as they're shown in Macrium.

So far I've imaged the first two drives at the top of the list (I'm kind of avoiding running backups while I'm using the PC to avoid any complications so I wait until I'm going to bed to continue backing up).

And I now have 2.43 TB free of 3.63 TB on the 4 TB external drive.

Then I have the other 2 TB external drive (it'll probably show up as 1.7 TB in windows or something).

If you were in my shoes how would you backup the remaining 3 drives with these two external drives? If you can provide as much detail as possible that would be great. I'm thinking I'll just back up the remaining drives according to how you tell me to then I'll have to look for a 8-10 TB external or something to make backups in the future as painless as possible.

But for now I can at least try to make a full backup so I have one backup available and not zero lol

 

[USAFRet]

Disk 4 to the 4TB
Disk 3 & 5 to the 2TB.

 

[zagaldus]

Perfect thank you USAFret.

Will work on this some more tonight and I guess it's time to find a 10 TB external to just back everything up to one drive.

If you have any suggestions for reliable drives in that size bracket or close please do let me know.

And I was looking at that encryption post you linked me to and it looks like a very sticky/messy situation encrypting backup drives. Maybe it's best I just have the backup drives encrypted then simply decrypt it manually myself every time I'm going to do the incremental backups (which I think I'll do every 2 weeks) in the future to avoid so many headaches and messing with boot files, etc

 

[USAFRet]

Here's a Seagate external, 8TB, $150
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Desktop-External-STEB8000100/dp/B01HAPGEIE

 

[zagaldus]

So I'm nearly done with this first full initial backup of the drives, will finish that up tonight. Thanks for that link by the way.

But after some thinking I figured it's probably best I get another 4-6 TB drive and preferably WD blue since those have been extremely reliable for me. Then I'll just buy an enclosure for it.

My question about this is...would I run into any issues at all doing automatic incremental backups with Macrium later if I"m using two 4 TB (or one 4 the second 6 tb) external drives?

Because I'd like to be able to just have Macrium automatically back up everything that has changed every 2 weeks or so like you do and I want it to be one single operation where it backs up any changed data across all my drives to the two backup drives without me having to 'intervene' to choose this and that drive to backup like I'm having to do now doing the first full initial backup. I just want it to be one simple automated incremental backup operation as I sleep but I don't know if doing that with 2 backup drives as the target would complicate this process.

Or is my only choice to buy a single 6-8 TB drive to accomplish this?

 

[USAFRet]

You can have Macrium back up individual designated drives to multiple other drives.

My routine backs up each physical drive individually. Mine all go to the same "drive" (the NAS volume), but different folders in that volume. That could just as easily be different physical drives.

Once you get the schedule set, its all hands off until you need it, or want to actually test the recovery steps.

 

[zagaldus]

Perfect, thank you USAFRet, one less thing I have to worry about.

Also do you have any recommendations for a great hard drive enclosure? Having a hard time with that and the one I'm using now isn't that great, with a power button that's hard to use to keep the drive on when turning it on, could definitely use something better that isn't lacking too much in any department.

 

[USAFRet]

Perfect, thank you USAFRet, one less thing I have to worry about.

Also do you have any recommendations for a great hard drive enclosure? Having a hard time with that and the one I'm using now isn't that great, with a power button that's hard to use to keep the drive on when turning it on, could definitely use something better that isn't lacking too much in any department.

I use a 4 bay MediaSonic.
https://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-ProBox-HF2-SU3S2-SATA-Enclosure/dp/B003X26VV4

My only beef with it is that the blue LED's are a bit too bright.