My Windows Back-up solution

My experience

One of the things that I don't like about Windows is the standard back-up solution provided by Windows. In my experience with customers, the tool wasn't reliable enough to use it widely with customers.

Especially the restore function didn't do well, the same is true Timemachine on MacOS.

Backup and Restore improvements Windows 10 and Windows 11

But they are working on new back-up feature in both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Building on the app restore feature we announced last year, we are introducing additional backup and restore capabilities in this build to make moving to a new PC easier than ever and to help app developers retain users across this new PC transition. The goal of these changes is to land users on a desktop that feels familiar to them and get them back to productivity within minutes on their new PC.

My own solution

My own solution that is manual and not can be used on any systems where is rsync available.

I first that with the files and folders that I don't want to back-up and these are...

One of the files called rsyncexclude.txt.

And it looks like this:

AppData/Local/Packages
AppData/Local/
"C:\Users\guill\VirtualBox VMs"
.vscode/extensions/*
AppData/Roaming/Code/
AppData/Roaming/EaseUS/*
AppData/Roaming/*
AppData/LocalLow/*
VirtualBox VMs/
.vagrant.d/*
.config/
.vscode

Note

You can make a text file called rsyncexlude.txt and copy the excluded files and folders into the text editor.

The next one is my powershell script.

Called: rsync.ps1

rsync -ahv --exclude-from="/cygdrive/c/Users/guill/rsyncexclude.txt" "/cygdrive/c/Users/guill/" "/cygdrive/D/GUILLERMO/EXTERNALDEVICE/SAMSUNGSHIELDT7"

It's easier since I don't need the type the whole command over and over again.

From the top of my head -ahvp meaning on rsync is, Archive, Human readable and Verbose. The external the device that I'm using is a Samsung SSD T7 Shield 1TB with NTFS. And I can use it directly on Linux (Fedora/Debian) without any issue. Even Bitlocker is supported. The files that have been copied to the external device can be used directly without unpacking anything[0]. That's a win in my eyes.

[0] Of course the smallers that I being zipped (using Tar, but you know what I mean) for a better transfer speed in general.

Done