ubuysa
The BSOD Doctor
Backing up Windows and programs is different from backing up user data, because its not possible to backup a file that is already open for exclusive use by another process, and many Windows files are opened exclusively, some application program files are too. To backup Windows and programs you'd use a disk imaging application to take an image of the drive, these use the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to take a 'snapshot' of the volume contents and they write this copy out to an image file on an external drive. I use Macrium Reflect (free) to do this overnight on a schedule (I also keep the last 7 images).
User data files are (almost) never opened exclusively and so can (usually) be backup up with any simple file copy application. I use SyncBackSE (paid) to do that because it only copies those files that have changed since the last backup. Again, I have this running overnight on a schedule backing up to an external drive.
NB. I actually run both Macrium Reflect and SyncBackSE twice each night writing to two separate drives so that I have two separate backups - I never like having only one copy of anything (critical data is synced into Google Drive too).
User data files are (almost) never opened exclusively and so can (usually) be backup up with any simple file copy application. I use SyncBackSE (paid) to do that because it only copies those files that have changed since the last backup. Again, I have this running overnight on a schedule backing up to an external drive.
NB. I actually run both Macrium Reflect and SyncBackSE twice each night writing to two separate drives so that I have two separate backups - I never like having only one copy of anything (critical data is synced into Google Drive too).