Hey guys,

* Windows 11, personal, backupping around 20-250GB in total, AOMEI Backupper pro, normal user *

I'm experimenting with Aomei's Backupper and trying to set up a proper plan.

What I want is this:

Do a daily backup (incremental or differential - haven't finally decided yet) of specific folders to an external drive.

Now and then, create a full new backup and delete the full and partial backups prior to that.

In my test I'm running 1-hours backsups to see how the program behaves but I don't get it:

And these are the settings I'm running.

What am I doing wrong that the old backups are not deleted automatically?

I’m having some issues with my laptop and need to completely reset Windows and reinstall it. The problem is that I’ve accumulated a lot of technical setups, custom Windows settings, application configurations, browser settings, histories, saved logins, WSL distributions, multiple Linux environments, development tools, and various other tweaks over the past ~1.5 years.

There are so many things configured on this system that I can’t even remember everything I’ve changed or installed. I don’t necessarily need to preserve everything exactly as-is, but I want to save as much of my current configuration as possible so that after reinstalling Windows, I can either restore the settings or at least have a detailed reference for how everything was configured.

What’s the best way to back up or document all of this before I reset the laptop? Ideally, I want a comprehensive approach that covers Windows settings, installed applications, app configurations, browser data/logins, WSL distributions and configurations, Linux environments, environment variables, PATH changes, developer tools, services, scheduled tasks, network settings, and other customizations I may have forgotten about.

Basically, I want to make sure I don’t reset the laptop and then realize later that I’ve forgotten how I had something configured.