Back-up software

[Reiten]

Can anybody suggest me a good, free software to back-up my files on Win7. I need to back-up files to an external HDD. Also it would be good if it had the functionality to do incremental back-ups. It would also be good if it could be run from a USB stick, but that is not absolutely essential.

Thanks for any suggestions.

P.S
Also please don't suggest the default windows back-up tool. I'm mainly asking because that one doesn't work. Long story short the System reserve partition doesn't have enough free space to execute the back-up tool(great work with this Microsoft). Tried a few of the simpler solutions that the inet provided, but none worked. The only thing left to try is to make that partition larger, but I don't feel like messing with that at the moment.

 

[Originality]

The system reserved partition was never designed for storing system backups, only boot related files like the BCD (it's only 100MB big).

You don't need to create a new partition for Windows backups, just point it where you want it (I do D:\Backups\) and select what you want included in the backups, and if you want it to make a system image (usually updated incrementally afterwards). The only issue I encountered is one day when I discovered the incremental updates were eating up all my drive space.

For paid backup software, there's Acronis. For free software, I recently used AOMEI Backupper for drive cloning. It has backup features too, but I never got to test them.

 

[Reiten]

Thanks I'll check them out.

And I'm not making a back-up on the system reserve partition. Windows needs around 40MB free space there to make some kind of "Shadow copy" before it even starts the back-up process.