Windows 7: Drive image question!

Years ago I used a little IBM app that put a complete drive image on a floppy, and took less than half an hour to transfer. It had to be an IBM drive though.
When I try to make a drive image nowadays the proggie usually tells me it can only do it to a drive of at least equal size.
Can one not make an image of a partition only, and restore it to a partition of equal size?

You can but not with the built in tools. You need something like Acronis true home, or paragon disk suite.


I use Acronis for all my imaging. I back up OS partition only and have restored it several times.

A complete restore takes about 20 mins for 80 gigs

Ken

I have Acronis, and would like to try that. But I would rather make a partition with OS plus all installed apps on one partition, and make an image of that. That should save the trouble of re-installing all applications after a restore, shouldn't it?

Yes, that will work. It's what I do. What version of Acronis do you have?

You shouldn't need to have target drive the same size, unless you are cloning (even then it wouldn't have to be the same size, but size is a consideration). If you were simply creating a drive image, it would be compressed, and you'd only need to have room for the image file, which in Acronis should be a .tib file.

That's exactly what I did: Install Windows 7, set it up the way I wanted, installed and configured all programs I deemed necessary and finally backed up the whole partition with acronis true image onto an external drive. So in case of a total crash I have the system back in working order within 20 or so minutes.
-DG

Acronis True Image Home 2010.

You can make the image smaller by putting your User folders on a separate data partition (also backed up - I drag and drop to external). This also keeps your data safe in its own "vault" in case of irreparable OS failure.

Then if you need to reimage your OS/programs partition, just reimage the OS partition and your data is next door waiting to go.

User Folders - Change Default Location

I just ran a backup image on Acronis, aand there is so much room left on my 500GB second drive that for now it's no problem at all.
I will look for an external enclosure and take that drive out of the tower, so it won't be running all that time for nothing.

Just bought the enclosure on Ebay. Geez, that stuff has gotten cheap!
BTW, about the difference between a compressed img backup and cloning.
Cloning takes more space, but I should be able to take the clone drive and boot it, right?
Can you clone partitions too, or only whole disks?