Roll Your Own Windows Time Machine (Premium)

Last week, a reader asked me if Microsoft or any third parties offer a full backup and restore solution like Apple's Time Machine. Microsoft does not, not anymore, at least. And as for third parties, yeah, I'm sure such things do exist. But image-based backups like Time Machine aren't just old school, they're increasingly obsolete. Today, there's a better way to achieve most of the benefits of this type of backup and restore solution that also avoids the downsides.

What are those downsides, you ask?

Most image-based backup solutions require a local storage device, typically an external drive, and that means you're very much bound to whatever physical location in which that drive is found. If you are away from the drive, you can't restore arbitrary data or the entire system. Likewise, when you're detached from the device, it's not keeping the backup data up to date. (I assume cloud-based image backup solutions exist now too, but these will be constrained by connectivity speeds.) Put simply, an image-based backup is something you basically need to manage, even though it's technically automated.

Image-based backups are also, by nature, representative of one or more slices of time. You're backing up as you go, in the background, and then one day you wish to restore the PC fully, perhaps to an early backup you made when everything was new and fresh, or perhaps from a newer, more up-to-date image. And ... you get whatever is in that image. That is, the backup image contains everything that was on that PC at that slice in time. And that could include bad things. Malware you didn't discover until later, whatever.

But in this modern cloud era, there is a better way. Or, I should say, a better set of ways: using tools that are (mostly) included with Windows 10 and 11, you can achieve almost everything provided by image-based backup solutions and more.

And in two of the three cases, you will be literally going back to the beginning---a clean install of the OS, for example, or clean installs of your apps---which, yes, means you may need to configure a few things to get up and running completely, whereas an image-based backup of the same system would retain whatever configuration changes you'd made to Windows and your apps before the backup image was created.

I will argue, however, that this newer approach is still better as we step through these processes. But here's the asterisk that should mollify the doubters: you can always do both. You can still use whatever image-based backup solution you prefer and the three tools I discuss here, side-by-side. They don't interfere with each other, and perhaps through experimentation, you may discover that you prefer this newer approach. Or not. Let's find out.

At least two of the three tools will be familiar to most readers: Reset this PC (or Windows 11 Setup media), OneDrive, and the Windows Package Manager (winget). And while Reset this PC is core to Windows, two of these tools can be rep...