Based on the very helpful information posted here by many users, I decided to try Redo Backup. Here is my experience with Redo:
1. I went to the Redo Backup website (http://redobackup.org/) and downloaded the .ISO file. I didn’t feel comfortable with the fact that I had to download it from Sourceforge (in the past they’ve had a reputation of including spyware with their downloads), but I plunged forward anyway. I don’t believe I had any problem at the Sourceforge website. I then created a CD using the .ISO file.
2. The CD that you create is Ubuntu with Redo Backup installed and loading at startup. It works very well. Also, there are a limited number of Ubuntu utilities available by clicking the gearwheel at the bottom left of the screen; for example, File Explorer and Chromium browser. There is a very interesting-looking utility there — one which allows you to put the entire Ubuntu/Redo environment on a USB flash drive. (I didn’t try it because I didn’t have time, although I wanted to really bad.) I have had a lot of problems using other USB flash drive creator programs for various distros of Linux Live; perhaps this one would actually work for me. I’m sure it will, because the Redo developers likely made sure it would work before including it with the distro.
3. I chose to do a backup; it asked me where I wanted to put it; I told it to put it on my external USB hard drive. But although it could see the external drive, it couldn’t access it. I had to unmount the drive, unplug it, and plug it in again in order for Redo to be able to access the drive. If I had waited till I was in the Redo environment before plugging in the external drive, I don’t think I would have seen that issue.
4. I had the opportunity to create a folder on the backup drive for this backup. I highly recommend that you create a folder for your backup, because Redo creates a LOT of files as part of the backup; it would be good to have all of that in one sensibly-named folder. And you probably should include “Redo” as part of the folder name, because a year or two from now, you may not remember which backup program you used to create the backup.
5. The backup took a long time — six hours. I tried browsing with the included browser while the backup was running; but the backup had high priority with the computer’s resources, so it was an excruciatingly slow process to try to surf the web while the backup was running. In other words, you need to figure on your computer not being available while the backup is running. There may be a way to set the backup to low priority on computer resources, but I didn’t see anything along those lines.
6. Make sure you get the total space required for the backup, plus how much space you have available on your backup drive, before rebooting with the Redo Backup disk. My backup failed at 74% because it ran out of space on the backup drive; but I couldn’t find how to determine the available space once I was in Redo. There’s probably a way, I just couldn’t find it.
I backed up my data drive, not my Linux drive; therefore, I haven’t yet tested Redo doing a full image backup and restore of a Linux drive. But I believe that it will work just fine for this purpose, because I am running the backup from a drive other than my Linux drive, and because I have booted into a different OS than the one I’m backing up.
If I get the backup going right before I go to bed, or right before I leave for work in the morning, it will run during a time that I’m not wanting to use the computer; therefore, I’m not worried about how long it takes to do a backup, nor that the computer isn’t available while a backup is running. And if I make sure there is enough available space for the backup before I reboot into Redo, I won’t run into the “available space” problem.
In summary, I like this program. And I like the fact that there are some useful Ubuntu utilities available when I am in the Redo environment.
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server
