Fastest and most secure way to back up hard drives?

[OCD-FREAK]

hello everyone,

 

do any of you know what is the best way to back up my clients hdd for a format in the fastest way possible ? i mean is there  another way than the traditional copy and paste - god zilla - total commander etc... i mean are there any specific hardware that backup an hdd data very fast in a secure way ? 

 

any and all opinions are more than appreciated.

 

thank you all  

[jj9987]

Unix dd command. That is if you want to back up the whole drive, including partition table.

[mariushm]

Create a disk image. That doesn't care about file structure, fragmentation, antivirus programs blocking files from being transferred...

[Mira Yurizaki]

What data do you need to back up? If it's absolutely everything, then the above solutions would work. But if it's only a selection of files, then you need to look at other solutions.

 

But to get at least the "fast" and "secure" part, find a backup solution that does either differential backups and data snapshots. This will update only what's changed and provides a checkpoint so that you can recover the data from another point in time.

[OCD-FREAK]

1 hour ago, jj9987 said:

Unix dd command. That is if you want to back up the whole drive, including partition table.

so that is the fastest way i can back up the hdd of my clients asking for an OS fresh install ?

[OCD-FREAK]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

Create a disk image. That doesn't care about file structure, fragmentation, antivirus programs blocking files from being transferred...

but what is the fastest way i can back up the hdd of my clients asking for an OS fresh install ? thanks 

[OCD-FREAK]

33 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

What data do you need to back up? If it's absolutely everything, then the above solutions would work. But if it's only a selection of files, then you need to look at other solutions.

 

But to get at least the "fast" and "secure" part, find a backup solution that does either differential backups and data snapshots. This will update only what's changed and provides a checkpoint so that you can recover the data from another point in time.

but what is the fastest way i can back up the hdd of my clients asking for an OS fresh install ? thanks 

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, OCD-FREAK said:

but what is the fastest way i can back up the hdd of my clients asking for an OS fresh install ? thanks 

If this is backing up their data before wiping their drive and your clients aren't going to give you specifics, then make a copy of everything in their user directory, then copy that back in when the OS install is complete. If you want some peace of mind, you can use the CLI command robocopy.

[wasab]

Clonezilla os. 

[Sors]

I use Acronis true image, because it came free with an external hard drive, and so far it has worked great, an average office PC with mostly word and excel files takes like 20-30 minutes to backup the entire disc into a drive image file,  the recovery time is about the same.