How to organize a Windows backup?

Question

Windows

Hello comrades!
With data reservation, everything is more or less clear. I'm interested in copying the system disk.
There is a certain computer on which Linux (sda..) and Windows 10 (sdb2) live together. I want to make an offline copy of the system drive C: Windows 10.
Of course, there is a simple solution: dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=backup.img
The solution is simple, working, but not very economical. sdb2 is 250Gb in size and this approach will produce a file with a size of 250Gb at the output. Regardless of actual location.
Of course, you can archive, but still, there will be a lot of bad work on archiving the "empty" place.
Is it necessary to do a bitwise copy of the partition?
Would the rsync option work?
Are there files on the C: drive in Windows 10 that are hard-linked to sectors that cannot be moved?
That would have been more economical.

mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt
rsync -acr /mnt/* /home/backup

I could mess up with the rsync keys, because I write from memory.
It is clear that everything is copied, but will this backup work after recovery?

Answer 1

Firstly , there is a built-in archiving - it works great, and without problems it takes a snapshot of the system state from which you can then restore the system.
Secondly , there is an excellent utility of Russinovich disk2vhd which makes an image of the indicated disks without any problems.
Moreover, it has both GUI and CLI, in general, you can make an image from a batch file according to a schedule. This image is also convenient in that it can be instantly connected to a VM and booted from it.
In both cases, a shadow snapshot of the volume (snapshot) is taken, so it is done on the fly, without rebooting and at any time. Well, of course, copying is not sector-by-sector - only the space occupied by files is copied.
For example, the user moved the system from windows 7 to windows 10, and a week later it turned out that the user did not remember the password for the online service, in the old system it was saved in his browser and he needed a crypto key and a certificate that were stored in the registry of the old OS - we load the virtual machine from backup disk and pull out everything you need.

Are there files on the C: drive in Windows 10 that are hard-linked to sectors that cannot be moved?

No.

It is clear that everything is copied, but will this backup work after recovery?

All people are divided into three types

• Those who do not make backups.
  
• Those who make backups
  
• And those who not only make backups, but also check them.
  

Answer 2

Try Veeam backup. agent is free. And there are a lot of ways.