From: nospam@needed.invalid   
      
   On Tue, 2/17/2026 4:37 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:   
   > On Tue, 17 Feb 2026 03:08:29 -0500, Paul wrote:   
   >   
   >> The Free version would appear to do Fulls, the Paid version is Full,   
   >> Incremental and Differential (the latter two could be related to   
   >> Fast Backup terminology).   
   >   
   > rsync gives you all that in the free version. And that’s Free   
   > software, not freeware.   
   >   
      
   The Windows backup programs, are intended to allow ordinary people   
   to make some kind of backup.   
      
   The very best attempt (in terms of a UI humans could use), was   
   one of the years Acronis did a spin of TIH. You could tell they   
   hired someone just for their storyboarding skills. The product   
   looks like it was peeled right off a storyboard. What stands out,   
   is how few clicks it takes to initiate a backup. But in later   
   years, Acronis got on a kick of larding up the product with   
   an AV, and that diluted the backup part of the package to   
   insignificance. Any time a package has twelve functions,   
   "it's own browser", you can hardly see the valuable parts   
   of the suite, for the garbage.   
      
   With Macrium, I just do Fulls, and not that often.   
   The Macrium file can be mounted by the Macrium software,   
   but there was also an "IMG2VHD.exe" converter for converting   
   a backup into a VHD. And VHD can be mounted by the OS, or   
   used in virtual machines.   
      
   The Windows backup program, the folder looks a lot like   
   the Clonezilla backup folder. But where Clonezilla uses partimage   
   files per partition, Microsoft uses a VHD per partition. And then   
   if you want, you can randomly access those if you want to extract   
   a single file. in Windows 7, the software used VHD files, and   
   in later OSes, at some point they switched to VHDX (which doesn't   
   have a 2.2TB capacity limit). and there are fewer tools for working   
   with that. 7ZIP (as a kind of equivalent to a libarchive) can   
   burrow into a VHD, but it is not set up for VHDX.   
      
   It is just good to have lots of options in the workflow, where   
   a user can get things done, without too much command line being needed.   
      
      Paul   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)