Managing System Image & Backups

I use Backup & Restore in Windows 7 Home Premium to save backups to an internal hard drive (not the ststem drive) and use a USB hard disk to save System Images on.

If I want to delete any backups that is no problem using the "Manage Space" in Backup & Restore.

However, if I want to delete an old image that is on my USB drive, I cannot use the "Manage Space", as that is looking at my secondary internal hard disk and hence says that there are no System Images on the drive. I then have to customise my backups to save to the USB hard drive and run a new backup, before it will let me manage the System Image on this USB drive.

Is there a registry edit or similar that will allow "Manage Space" to look to the two seperate hard disks, one for backups & the other for system images?

Keith French.

If one is using a USB flash drive for data backups only, then, I don't believe Windows 7 let's you manage the space.
You can schedule file backups to go to the USB drive, but that will then fill up the USB drive, eventually; unless you manually delete file backups from time to time. (Perhaps it won't fill up quickly if subsequent backups are incremental).

Can someone shed some light on this?

Yes, Jonathan, the 'Manage Space' option does appear. However, for a 'File' backup (to a USB flash drive), when you click on that option, it just allows you to view the saved backups and then manually delete selected backups. I don't believe there is a way of having the backup program manage the space automatically.

Keith French
The MS Backup restore options are restrictive in my opinion.
But for images you can just delete them like any other folder.
Given that you have heaps of cheap space on a USB hard drive you can rename the folder by adding something to the end of the name. MS will then create a new image when told to and leave this renamed one alone otherwise it will overwrite images in the same partition. If for some reason you want to recover from the old image rename it back to the [WindowsImageBackup] and recover from it.
I actually keep more than one image on 2 separate ext HDDs along with file backups on the ext HDDs.

I would like an option off to the left under "Create a system image" which says "create a full backup now" at a location of my choosing without going into "Change Settings"