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I came across various free tools such as Macrium Reflect.
May I know does Macrium free version provides "resume" capability? As my current HDD contains a lots of files and folder which I believed it will take quite long to complete.
I also came across another tool called TeraCopy. Anyone tried that? Is it really faster and secure?
Please advise.
Thanks
TeraCopy is about the same as Windows' robocopy in speed, but it does lots more of what you don't need and it hooks into the system in non-obvious ways. The only real benefit is that it has GUI while robocopy is command-line and it may overwhelm a bit with all its options.
But fear not, here's all you need -
robocopy X:\ Z:\Backup-of-X\ /MIR /Z /FFT
where X:\ is your external drive you are backing up and Z:\Backup-of-X\ is a directory where you want the backup to go.
/MIR tells it to create an exact copy of the tree, i.e. remove files from the backup that don't exist at the source.
/Z enables resumable copying of large files, so you can Ctrl-C robocopy half way through a large file and it will start copying from the second half on the next run.
/FTT tells it to assume 2-second timestamp resolution. This has to do with how robocopy detects which files have changed and which haven't. It's a long story, just use /FFT.
If a filesystem-level copy is OK to you, teracopy seems me a good choice.
If you want a sector-by-sector copy (for example there are tricky non-windows partitions of your external drive, or you want to be able to boot from that), I used the commandline dd from the linux world.
