Reliable way to Backup & Restore Drive ?

[Exaco]

Hi there,

I am looking for a way to backup my whole NVMe ( OS ) drive and put it somewhere on my HDD and later when I need Restore it.
Reason is that I reinstall Win quite often and it normally takes around a full day getting it into working condition ( "millions" of apps/plugins installed ) so I would like to skip the driver, app and plugin installing part.


So far I've tried .vhdx and .vhd both using Windows 11 default Backup tool and disk2vhd, getting the .vhdx or .vhd seems fine and it mounts with all files in when using "Attach VHD" in the Disk Management, I've also tried to run it in VirtualBox before trying to do/test the actual restore it didn't work even after converting with StarWind V2V .
But I didn't manage to Restore from it, I've tried using Vhd2disk which basically dumped blocks into my SSD but the SSD was still empty ( unallocated ) after the long process.
However the vhd2disk was odd, it didn't even say the format and there was only 1 partition shown in it even I saved 3. Nothing like here where it says "Boot" I had simply a checkbox and Type said "N".

The second way which didn't work was trying to create .wim file using the 

Mount-WindowsImage -ImagePath

and 

New-WindowsImage -CapturePath

commands, basically after New-WindowsImage it takes a while until the progress bar appears, around two hours later when it's almost done around 70% on the progress bar I simply get error and there's nothing I can do about it, no .wim for me.


Is there any better reliable way e.g. using Live Manjaro Linux or other distro ? I kinda gave up on the .vhd and .vhdx nonsense, already wasted full day playing w/ it and testing it, doesn't seem too reliable for me.

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id just use veeam here. Works well. Bootable utility to restore the backups. Free version for home/homelab use.

 

If your live booting, I just make a img of the file with dd. Works for me.

[Exaco]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id just use veeam here. Works well. Bootable utility to restore the backups. Free version for home/homelab use.

 

If your live booting, I just make a img of the file with dd. Works for me.

Thanks!
While reading/watching about Veeam I've also discovered Clonezilla ( Live USB ) which also does everything I need including converting Disk to Image file ( since I prefer having my OS backup on my "D:" drive aka HDD, there's even encryption feature ).

Veeam seems more powerful and maybe better, but since I do not use/own servers It's bit overkill for me