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Good luck and welcome to SevenForums!!
You can find several free backup programs that will do the job for you. This Seven Forums site has an extensive list of free programs that work with Windows 7.
FREE Great Programs for Window 7
Among others you will find:
Macrium Reflect
If you have a Seagate or Western Digital hard drive in your system you can get an Acronis True Image HD manufacturer version:
Seagate DiscWizard
Western Digital, Acronis True Image WD Edition Software
If you want to find all your system information and more:
SIW - System Information for Windows
Another Seven Forums thread for 64 bit Win7 free programs:
Free 64-bit programs
You should always keep your system image backups on a different physical hard drive or storage media, an external hard drive works well for this. Depending on the amount of personal data you have a smaller media like DVD or big flash drive might be enough.
If you keep your image backups on the main hard drive and it fails you will loose everything, operating system, personal data and your backup. Hard drives do fail.
Last edited by Dave76; 27 Sep 2009 at 08:08.
To use System Image as you main backup plan, you need to have some knowledge how to use Virtual PC or Disk Management to extract single files and / or folders from the image. I would recommend you used both: create a System Image to be able to restore your system completely, and create a scheduled backup to use when you only need to restore some files or folders.
I've used the system image and been totally happy with it. At work we have several identical computers (same make and model, same hardware), so to test if we could migrate to Windows 7 I installed build 7100 to one of these computers, installed then all the software we need to have on every computer. After everything was installed, I created a System Image to an external HD, and a System Recovery Disc. Using System Recovery Disc to boot the two other computers, I then restored the image I had created with the first computer. Everything went smoothly, after this procedure all three computers had a working Windows 7 with all of our software.
To restore a System Image you start the Backup and Restore Application and click Recover system images or your computer at the bottom of the page. From the next page you choose Advanced recovery methods, then Use a system image you created earlier to recover your computer, following the instructions given to you on your screen.
When your computer has crashed and you can not start Windows, you can use Recovery Disc to boot. Windows 7 Help gives detailed information how to do this:
Hope you find all the info you need. I will give you some rep points for showing you understand the importance of backup. On this forum I've often lost my nerves when reading some members posts telling backup is not so important. It is refreshing to notice you really want to be prepared. Nobody wants problems with the computer, nobody wants the computer to crash. But s*** happens.Windows 7 Help and Support said:
Kari
Last edited by Kari; 27 Sep 2009 at 08:25.
Yes, I have used it. Between test boxes at work and getting all of my hardware squared away at home...I've restored using this tool at least 20 different times on 4 different machines and have not encountered any problems at all restoring. I've backed up to internal secondary drive, I've backed up to external USB drives and I've even backed up to DVD media and restored from all of them.
The only "issue" i experienced was backing up a 160GB drive (which was nearly empty) with the utility and then trying to restore it onto an 80GB drive to test out the 80GB drive and the utility would not allow me to restore it onto a smaller disk.
thanks alot guys
thanks kari
i now know how to backup and i will let you know how it goes
good news guys
all went to plan
my system image was created successfully
and system repair disc also worked fine
thanks alot
now i just have to do a rugular windows backup of my personal files
But did you actually try to restore to see if it really works?
Might be a good idea to at least check if you can boot from the repair disk and check if it will find/see and allow you use the backup image you created. That's where it failed for me. Ymm (hopefully) v.
I downloaded and installed Macrium Reflect and man - even the free version is impressive!
Much faster then the regular backup program in Windows 7 and the backup image file is mounted as a drive letter for you without any effort once the backup is completed!
I restored a few odd files form that new drive letter (ok, so I used explorer to drag and drop them) to verify that they were all ok and it all worked fine, data was intact and .exe file worked. File sizes were identical to the originals!
You even get a PE-type of CD ISO to use for system recovery.
I'm (almost) sold on getting the paid version to get the easier file at a time recovery thing.