Win 7 System Images - incremental or not?

Yes, a lot of people are not quite sure what win sys img is doing - both during backup and restore.

Use whatever method and whatever program works for you - and you feel comfortable with.

larrymcg said:

Since the imaging approach seems incredibly complicated, and there are many (conflicting?) answers to the original question, I'm going with simplification. My backups do not generate an image (just file backups). When I want to do an image I rename the previous one and then manually request a new image. They take a while to do (since each is a full or base image) but there are always big periods in a day when the PC has nothing else to do anyway.

I also figure I only really need 2 images: a relatively old one (one or two months old) and a new one. I'm thinking I can restore from either one and then use the file backups to get up to date.

--Larry

But the problem with such strategy is the HDD lifetime. I mean it's not good if you write many TBs on your external HDD monthly. I'd rather do incremental/differential image. I try use my external HDD as less as possible because I want it to survive many years.

25 images ?

That's being careful. LOL

whs said:

Frozenthunder said:

larrymcg said:

Since the imaging approach seems incredibly complicated, and there are many (conflicting?) answers to the original question, I'm going with simplification. My backups do not generate an image (just file backups). When I want to do an image I rename the previous one and then manually request a new image. They take a while to do (since each is a full or base image) but there are always big periods in a day when the PC has nothing else to do anyway.

I also figure I only really need 2 images: a relatively old one (one or two months old) and a new one. I'm thinking I can restore from either one and then use the file backups to get up to date.

--Larry

But the problem with such strategy is the HDD lifetime. I mean it's not good if you write many TBs on your external HDD monthly. I'd rather do incremental/differential image. I try use my external HDD as less as possible because I want it to survive many years.

I think you imply 2 problems:

1. One should always have at least 2 external disks for every PC and alternate the images - just in case one disk breaks (which they rarely do).

2. If you have many GBs of stuff, most of it is data. That should be seperated from the OS into a data partition. Then you can image the system (which is usually between 20 and 40GB in size) and backup the data with a sync program.

The system images will be between 11 and 22GBs and you should keep many (I always keep at least 25 images). The data sync moves very little data around (just what you altered since the last sync) and should not be stressful for any disk.

Then how do I tell Windows to save User- and ProgramDatafolder on another partition and not on my C:? because I would like to sync appdata and such too. My data like music, videos, pictures, documents actually doesn't change often. I never get new songs or videos or such. So most data which changes or grows is in Appdata folder and Programdata folder (found out that I could make some programs save data I record in different folders, so Programdata wouldn't be that big anymore).

Just found out that only my Program files folder is 68GB big, I got many many programs and games and such. 158GB is the used space in total, over 100GB is Windows+Programfiles+Programdata together. So each image would be at least 100GB and the seperate personal data like videos and such is only 50GB. So I'm not sure if it's worth it to create another partition on which I put only videos, music, pictures, documents and such, since I'm more the type of person which has alot of programs. Each person is individual :)

Would like to move programdata too. Programs + Windows in 1 image would be nice so then I don't have to reinstall.

SIW2 said:

Yes, a lot of people are not quite sure what win sys img is doing - both during backup and restore.

Apart from within Microsoft do you know anyone who does?
Better still do you have any solid technical references you can point people to?
Apart from general stuff like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHD_%28file_format%29