Windows 7: Image your system with free Macrium

Alan, I agree with you to a certain point. Restore points are not the most reliable feature of Windows. They have the habit to disappear or be unusable at times for no obvious reason - although there are instances where they will disappear for a good reason (resizing of the shadowstorage, disk cleanup and alike).

They can, however, be useful - e.g. for recovering lost files with Shadow Explorer. That is for those 'in between images' cases where you created and lost a file since the last image. It is not a sure bet, but has helped me at times.

I know the discussion of restore points is moving off your main tutorial topic but.....
I've read that system restore can degrade an SSD and interfere with TRIM performance. I run with System Restore disabled on my SSD. I never han any time for it anyway.

I don't see how it would degrade the SSD. And it would interfere with Trim only if there were not sufficient free space left on the SSD - appr. 10 to 20% as a rule of thumb. If you stuff your SSD to the gills, then the Garbage Collection cannot properly work.

I would right click a file for the benefit of the context menu so that I could check its version number etc.
The context menu would hang for perhaps one minute because System Restore anticipated the POSSIBILITY that I might be intending to delete the file, and BEFORE it allowed me access it tied up my single core processor and would consume a few hundred MegaBytes of free space as it preserved an instance of that large file in the current Restore Point.

System Restore was NOT content to monitor my system partition.
It would sporadically enable monitoring of all partitions regardless of registry prohibitions that should have stopped the nonsense.

System Restore was totally incompetent when deciding if a file was a system file or a user file.
It always captured Firefox Cache files as though they were System Files,
but when Restoring a Point it would NOT replace the latest cache files with the previous,
but instead it would leave me with both cache and cache(2) and it would tell me which of the two was what,
BUT there was not way to capture that information other than Pen on Paper because at that stage there was no Notepad.exe available.

I observed quite a few files that had (2) suffixes which persuaded me that System Restore was a bumbling bungler that was confused about much more than Firefox caches.

Regards
Alan

I have a couple of steps to go before I am completely happy with my daughter's laptop configuration. I'm going to upgrade this OS from Vista Home Premium to Windows 8 Pro later today so I have decided to wait and 'move' the location of the data files and folders until after the upgrade.

Before I store my final Macrium C: image and perform the OS upgrade, I want to address the 47MB EISA and 3GB Dell Recovery partitions on the hdd (see snip). I would like to eliminate both of those.

Looking back at my first MR experience (just a few weeks ago), with the Windows 7 setup on my desktop, I used EasyBCD to copy the boot files over to C: and then elimiated the 100MB partition which was part of the Dell Windows 7 installation. Is the 47MB partition here on Vista the same as that partition? and, if I follow the same steps that I took using EasyBCD will I be okay?

For the 3GB partition, my plan is to delete it, since I have all of the recovery disks that were shipped with this Dell laptop.

Thx in advance...

In reference to my previous post above, I confused a recent SSD install with my first Macrium system image project on my desktop. For my current project, EasyBCD informed me that the boot files already exist on C:.

Regardless, I'm still curious to know if it's possible to remove the two subject partitions without creating problems? From what I can tell, the small 47MB partition contains a Dell Utility file, and the larger 3GB partition is for Dell's recovery files.

I apologize for the confusion...

I tried but was unable to remove the 47MB partition. It's still there and I'm not concerned at all about it at this point. It's gonna stay!

I don't really know how I did it, but take a look at the two snips... I went from a +150GB C: drive on my daughters laptop down to 15.88GB after our successful Windows 8 Pro upgrade. I did a lot of tweaking and moving things around before it got to this number. It sure seems low to me, but everything is working fine except the dell internal wireless driver, which will not go faster than 54 Mbps (we were accustomed to a fairly consistent 270 Mbps on this laptop before). We still have a couple of items to install, but I don't think they'll take up more than 2-3 GBs.

There was only one big game (approximately 19GB) and we ended up uninstalling it since it hadn't been played in many months. If my daughter decides to reinstall it later there's plenty of room.

The user data, mostly music, music videos and photos, came out to about 29GB. A big surprise to me (and a huge space saver), was the reduction of the WinSxS folder: Before the Win 8 upgrade it was 18.5GB; now it is approximately 6GB. Twelve gigs here and 19gigs there adds up really fast.

Anyway, all of our computers are now much leaner than before and thanks to this forum and this thread in particular, whs, I now have a solid system imaging and data backup effort underway. It's still not perfect, but I feel really confident about it, and would highly recommend Macrium for any one looking to start a backup program or change an existing one.

5 minutes and 15 seconds vs. a day or two... it's a 'no-brainer!'

That looks good. Glad you were successful.

I just installed a Samsung 840Pro 128GB SSD on an older PC and Macrium gave me this error when I attempted to perform the basic Windows (sys reserved + OS) image.
Backup aborted - Failed to create Volume snapshot Result code 0x8000ffff
When I ran the imaging a 2nd time it went ok

It's like being let down by an old friend. Volume Shadow Copy service set to manual like it always has been.
I 'm running the latest version of free Macrium. Has anyone come across this type of error?

Macrium suggest that this is a Windows problem. Googling it turns up a number of hits, this one near the top of the list.VSS Error:0x8000ffff - Backup aborted! - Failed To Create Volume Snapshot. (VSS)