gotcha Recommended reading.

I'll give a full report on the Paragon-incremental-copy/enclosed-internal-HDD backup plan as soon as I have it going.I tried Paragon and just couldn't get it working. It has all the right checkboxes and appears to offer what I'm after, but I had no LUCK. Sometimes it wiped out the whole clone when I wanted it to update it. Sometimes it just did a whole clone instead of an incremental one. I could never CREATE a bootable clone.

Acronis created a bootable clone and I used it to migrate to a larger disk.

XXClone offers incremental cloning and actually does it properly. I haven't booted successfully from it in an external enclosure and haven't tried installing it in my laptop. So for now I'll settle for a possibly-bootable but effectively incremental cloning system.Try Macrium Reflect...same price as Paragon.I got Paragon doing incremental backups; it works perfectly for me.
User error then...Quote from: Salmon Trout on March 23, 2010, 12:28:08 PM

I got Paragon doing incremental backups; it works perfectly for me.

Backup Facilities
· Support of all present day techniques to store backup images:

- Backup The term backup originates from the time when the best way to protect valuable information was to store it in form of archives on external media. It's become now a general notion to mean making duplications of data for protection purposes. to local mounted/unmounted (without drive letter assigned) partitions;

- Backup to an external mounted STORAGE to provide for a higher level of data protection and system independence;

- Backup to a special secured place on the hard disk called the Backup Capsule that has an independent system layout (e.g. a separate partition) and will stay operable should the active file system be damaged. To avoid an accidental removing or unauthorized access of the backup data, this partition is hidden and thus cannot be mounted in the operating system;

- Backup to external media (CD/DVD) to guarantee a high level of data protection as long as the backup media is kept secure;

- Backup to a NETWORK drive to stand a better chance of success in case of a hard disk failure;

· Sector backup to save not only all on-disk information but also the system service structures. It is IDEAL for making a backup image of an entire hard disk or system partitions to guarantee the operating system’s working capability.

· Differential backup to a sector image to only archive changes since the last full sector-based image, thus considerably saving the backup storage space. To restore this kind of backup you will require a full image and one of its differentials.