Since it's Windows anyway I don't use open source.<p>I do it manually using the built-in Windows 11 tools.<p>Boot to the Windows Startup Media, go to Command Line, at the "DOS" prompt you will be at a ramdrive X:. Ready to accept your commands.<p>Your regular Windows partition will (almost always) still be C: (which you can check) but since you are not actually booted to that partition, your entire Windows installation, whatever you have on C: at the time, is just sitting there idle, nothing more than a bunch of dormant files & folders which you can now back up comprehensively without any of them being in use at the time.<p>Use the DISM /Capture-Image command to create a .WIM file from your entire C: volume and store it on a device of your choice. The default compression ends up about half the space it takes up normally. It helps if you don't have anything wasting space on C: that you don't really need beforehand, so the comprehensive backup file is not un-necessarily huge.<p>Most of the time your Boot files are not on your C: volume so they are not backed up in this process.<p>You should be confident at booting to the startup media, backing up, reformatting, and restoring to the same partition. The Boot files in their hidden partition would be expecting that, and can remain untouched.<p>From the startup media you restore the saved .WIM file to a waiting partition using the DISM /Apply-Image routine.<p>Look at the Help for DISM, it is very powerful but don't be confused, it takes very little mastery if all you are going to use it for is backup & restore.<p>If you restore the backup .WIM file to new drive hardware you would have to partition and format the drive beforehand, and then it would restore to the empty filesystem fine. But in this case Boot files were not already there on the drive from previous use so you would have to freshly create them according to the situation at hand. For this, one of the commands that may be worthwhile to learn about is BCDBOOT and you can get what you want.<p>This is ideal for transferring to different size partitions or drive hardware, but nothing's perfect and some software is a little deficient even with the native backup, so may occasionally need to be re-licensed after restoration.<p>The completely comprehensive way is the simplest, and it's a full backup of everything on C:, not just the essential Windows operating system.<p>Incremental snapshots can then be taken after that using DISM also, you might want to address that once you have well rehearsed the full backup & restore to your satisfaction.<p>Oh, yeah, I believe Clonezilla is open source, seems to work OK and it can be good if you want to have a whole-disk backup including your boot files.<p>But generating your own boot files from Windows, the way you want them whenever you need to is way more versatile, and just as easy to learn. Then you don't need Clonezilla.<p>Plus with Clonezilla you're booting to a Linux starting media in order to access your Windows partition while it's dormant, but DISM is a built-in Windows routine for this exact task.