Full image Backup, Restorable in Full, Including boot ability retained
Questions for Acronis / True Image Is there a solution that will create a full image, byte for byte, sector for sector (including boot sector) of a drive to a drive of equal or larger size? If there is that solution, how does it work if executed within a running system OR does that solution mean a stand alone OS is booted, I would assume from a USB drive. If that solution exists, is it safe to assume that a restore of the full image would also be done via a standalone OS? My concern is that while I want to do a full, bootable, sector for sector copy of my only physical disk, which contains Win 10, a bunch of applications, a couple of bunches of data and I'm not sure I can, or how I could create that backup if I'm running it at the same time as the Win 10 environment is active ... writing to the same physical disk that I'm making the image of. Bottom line, this is a thing I want to do on a weekly basis ... because I'm tired of losing disks for which I don't have images, because when or if I do lose that disk, even if I've ben taking backups on a directory by directory manner, I would STILL have to rebuild the OS, reinstall the applications, and restore whatever unique pointers the OS would need to get at those applications and data I'm an old timey mainframe systems programmer who supported IBM VM environments before I retired. We did backups ... images ... DDR (Dynamic Disk and Restore) on a regular (weekly, if I recall) basis to tape, which we could IPL and use to restore the entire operating environment in case of disaster (disaster = head crash on one or more DASD (Direct Access Storage Devices (aka hard drives). *that's* what I want in my personal systems.
Now word from a retired MVS systems programmer.
Phil, Acronis True Image (and its reputable competitors, for that matter) exist to provide the function you are looking for. Don't expect the low level details to exactly match what you know from the mainframe world; the functional capabilities are there. If you take a "disks and partitions" backup of your system drive (or an "entire PC" back), and you create a USB recovery device, you will be able to boot from the recovery device and recover your system. No reinstallion of the operating system. No reinstallation of your programs. As Steve said, the system snapshot will contain all you need to recover your system.
That being said, there is always the possibility that a running program will be sequentially writing data right when the snapshot is taken such that some of the new data is in the backup and some is not. I don't know of anything other than a stand-alone backup that can avoid that problem. Of the multiple recoveries I have performed over the years, I have not run into that, but it can happen. It is always a good idea to use program's own data backup feature ... if it exists. Then recover the program's data after the system recovery.