How to Set Up Sector-Level Disk Backups vs Cloning

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Entire disks (physical or virtual) can be copied to one another using BackupChain. A “classic” disk backup uses a proprietary container file format; however, in BackupChain you can back up a physical hard drive to an open-standard virtual disk for the purposes of backup, for example, you could back up your system drive to a VHD or VHDX.

Later when disaster strikes and you need to restore, simply use BackupChain’s disk converter to copy the VHD back to a physical disk.

Alternatively, BackupChain also offers live disk to disk backup between physical disks. You could set up a schedule and have BackupChain copy from one disk to the other every night. In case you ever need to “go back”, all you need to do is detach the original disk and perhaps check your boot settings to ensure your PC/server will boot from the other disk. If you accidently deleted files on the source disk, the previous night’s data is immediately available on the backup disk you have.

In the special case of VHD and VHDX formats you can also add the VHD to the Windows Boot Manager and directly boot from it. This way you don’t have to copy the VHD back to a physical disk. Below is an example Windows Boot Loader configuration where the a VHD file (F:\vhdboot\win10ent.vhd) is used instead of a partition, to boot Windows:

Note this method of booting directly from a VHD or VHDX is part of Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 and later and requires a functioning boot loader. You could, for example, use this method to boot into a previous machine state of a server by having access to the VHD backup on a physical drive.

There are many options to manage each type of possible disaster using BackupChain. Disk backup comes handy when you need to protect system disks; however, file backup is also very useful and often more efficient than disk backup when you want to protect file server data.

Please refer to the section Sector-Level Disk Backup Strategies and Creating a New Disk Backup Task for detailed how-to information.