Awesome! When I've moved windows computers it's not easy getting to back the way my old machine was.

Can you link to a step by step on this - I think this would help a lot of folks.

Rather than rehash, I'll point you to Scott Hanselman's excellent (and old, but still valid) article on Windows backups.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/is-your-stuff-backed-up-recov...

Check out his YouTube videos as well, for a more visual walk-through.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL-fHOdarou-CR2XUmK48Og

Does that allow you to set up a new PC as an exact copy of the old one? Because Time Machine does just that, and I’d really like to find the Windows equivalent.

Probably an unpopular opinion, but I actually prefer to start from (nearly) scratch on a new machine as it gets rid of all the accumulated cruft. I use github + stow for my dotfiles, firefox sync for syncing browser history, bookmarks, etc and rclone + backblaze for backing up whatever is important enough. Beyond that, I don't care if I lose anything on the old machine.

Same. Every time I've tried copying stuff to a new machine via Time Machine the new machine feels unstable. There's so much stuff in ~/Library/Application Support type places that really shouldn't be copied so I just start the new machine empty and copy a few folders over (Documents, .ssh)

I don't like it but it does still feel good to start fresh. I do it in linux as well.

Isn't that easily accomplished by storing a disk image? (e.g. clobezilla, ssd migration software, snapshots,...). For that the OS is completely irrelevant.

There are two backup solutions on windows, 'windows 7 backup' (yes, wtf) allows you to make exact copy and clone it. There are also paid solution.

File history is for all your files, but it is amazing at it. You can roll back to a particular version from particular date