Computer backup issues?

It's like that with my Mac, but far far faster than using cloud backup. I have a cheap 4TB desktop drive inserted in a cheap USB 3.1 external drive dock. When I plugged it in, the Mac asked if I wanted to use it as a Time Machine drive. I said yes, and it made a full backup in the background. It does an incremental backup every hour, also in the background. When I get a new Mac (or, back in the days of platter disks, replaced the drive) and connect that external drive to it, the system says something like, "Oh! I see you have a Time Machine backup. Would you like to restore from the backup? I say yes, and in a little while, all my apps, data, settings, passwords, etc. are on the new machine and it's like nothing changed except the hardware. All with no time or effort on my part. As a redundancy, most of my data is also on the cloud and on other external drives, but that's not really necessary. I'm just a little obsessive.

 

I don't know about speed comparison to Chrom OS. AFAIK, the Chrome OS has no backup option in the setting. The system is a web browser so it has to be connected to the internet for the system to work. The system update takes place all the time in the background while using a computer, but I have never noticed any slow down. The files are created and stored on the fly in the cloud, and some apps such as Google Docs save historical versions if multiple editions are made. I do keep some files on my local machine since it has a 128GB SSD, but that is absolutely unnecessary. Many Chromebook works fine with just enough SSD (32GB) for system files without any storage space in the box.

In older Windows, my experience has been that the system backup and restore takes more time and requires an external drive to do so. It can be finicky to restore the system if you try to restore the file on a different version of windows or even on the same version but on different machines, and sometimes impossible to restore if the hardware signature does not much. But I think that has been getting better with Windows 10 and 11 utilizing the default system reset and restore. It can now restore the system image backups made in previous versions of Windows... At least that's what MS says, but I have never done it, so, I don't know how well it works. When I was using Windows machines more often, I always made a 100% clone of the HD or SSD, in case of the HD failure, but I really could not use the cloned drive on different machines, so if the machine failed other than HD, then restoring the system from the cloned copy was impossible.

There is no need to make any of those clones or time-stamped system image files for the ChromeOS.

 

The simplest way is to use Microsoft OneDrive. It is built-in to Windows 10 and 11. You may already be using it.

With OneDrive, you create a Microsoft account, enable OneDrive, and all of your documents are automatically backed up to Microsoft’s cloud servers. There’s nothing else to do. It’s extremely reliable and very secure, as long as your password is good and, of course, you need to remember your password.

 

One drive is not backed up. If there is a failure of there servers Microsoft will not guarantee data retrieval. If you use one drive to store your data the “backup” solution is a product called Skykick.