this week's reading is Dark Laboratory:
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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From what I understand, this mainly affected people with Western Digital/SanDisk drives (which, lucky me, I'm also using). I updated the firmware for the drive listed on the SanDisk site and I've run a few tests and things seem fine so far (I haven't bothered trying to rollback Windows itself, so we'll see if it sticks).
It seems like Kopia and restic are pretty popular open source options which work on all major operating systems.
Kopia has a GUI, but restic is (as far as I know) command-line only, so if that's important, just use whichever you feel comfortable with. I think you can schedule both to run automatically, so you won't need to worry much about doing it manually (I personally prefer to do it manually, but I've been bitten by that in the past thanks to my stubbornness here).
When it comes to full disk imaging (basically cloning your drive), CloneZilla is (IMO) the best option. RescueZilla is a more user-friendly frontend for that, which is what I use.
For a closed source option, Macrium Reflect is/was also okay in my experience, but I haven't used it in a while and I think they've limited the free option to an older version, though I might be wrong.
(Side note: I don't know how well the full disk imaging ones work when it comes to Windows systems encrypted with BitLocker. I know it used to be a bit complicated, but may have improved by now.)
Thank you for all this information! I really appreciate it a lot. All my drives are western digital but 2 are ones that shouldn't be affected and a side drive is(thankfully no data loss yet). I'll have to go check for updates.
This might be a silly question, but when you backup, do you need extra storage space 1:1 with whatever you're copying? Or does it compress the files somehow to keep those backups in a smaller form?
I've always just kept copies of files stored across drives but I've never done a full backup before
No prob, happy to help!
Not silly at all. I was actually going to mention it, but thought the comment was getting too long (lol). It depends on the backup being used, but Kopia and restic both use compression and store the data in archives.
I think, depending on the compression algorithm used, you can save a fair amount of space, but it does add up over time if you're backing up new (large) files often.
The application I use (BorgBackup, sadly not on Windows) is very similar to Kopia and restic, and just as an example, I ran a backup of brand new files that added up to around 14 GB on my computer, but the archive was only about 10 or 11 GB. Might have some numbers a bit wrong (not at my PC right now), but it's somewhere in that ballpark in terms of disk space saved.
They also won't backup files twice unless the file has changed, so large files like videos should only be copied over once since they rarely ever change unless someone changes the metadata or something, which most people won't do.
The only real downside is that you won't be able to just browse the files like normal and copy them back over. You need to first open the archive with the application, but then you can pick and choose which files you want to restore.
Ahh okay well that makes sense! Thank you from taking the time to explain it, I really appreciate that. I guess I should probably do that now and not be lazy about it again haha. That was my problem last time and look where it got me! Lol
Sorry for late reply, but totally. Laziness has done much the same to me on occasion. Actually, the most recent backup I did before last week was like two months previous.
And one of my external drives (more of an archive itself than an actual backup drive) is failing, but I've been too busy to send it in for a replacement. This thread has reminded me to get to that soon.