Latest multiple volumes image backup feature and why you should not use it

I recently added a setting to configure which volume(s) UrBackup should backup as image. I added this because it was requested in the forums. Feature requests work! Try them as well!

I will now continue on to modifying the restore CD to allow one to select the volume to restore. This will not be much work, so expect it soon with UrBackup Client 0.39, Server 0.25 and Restore CD 0.3.

Nevertheless I felt a little bit uneasy while adding this feature, because it is not really necessary in my opinion.

Incremental file backups are usually really fast. Incremental image backups currently not so much. So you should use file backups whenever possible. As additional benefit restoring only part of the data is much easier with file backups than with image backups, where you have to mount the image. If you want to be able to do a bare metal restore though and you use Windows having an image backup of your system volume is unavoidable. Restoring from files is not possible without reinstalling.

I will talk about why you do not need image backups at all if you use Linux soon.

So because file backups are faster and more convenient and you only need an image backup of your system volume backing up any other volume as image backup is suboptimal.

But now UrBackup does not stop you from doing it. It is your choice now.