Have you used windows backup before? Is it practical?

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  1. Posts : 155
    Windows 7 Professional 32 bit
       #1

    Have you used windows backup before? Is it practical?


    I use Macrium Reflect to image my hard disk, out of interest I ask if Windows backup is useful or practical?
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  2. Posts : 163
    Win7 64 Bit
       #2

    I used it and it was fine. Saved me a few times when I first got the new Win7. But I had bought Acronis for other reasons and it took over Win7 and even when I uninstalled Acronis Win7's backup was trashed for good. This is a known issue with Acronis and Win7.
    So I'm looking into another backup. Right now I clone the drive to a media bay drive in my Dell Latitude.
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  3. Posts : 155
    Windows 7 Professional 32 bit
    Thread Starter
       #3

    Using Windows backup can you create an image of partition and also create a "rescue" cd or flash drive that will restore the image to the original partition?
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  4. Posts : 10,455
    Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Service Pack 1
       #4

    Windows imaging is usable but as mentioned above can be a bit fragile. It also insists on backing up every partition it considers to be "system" each time, so if you have OEM partitions or a pagefile or SQL Server database on another partition it will include that one also. Macrium is much more stable and flexible.
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  5. Posts : 175
    Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
       #5

    I used it on my father's laptop before. Be prepared to use many DVDs even if the backup you have is fairly small. My dad's backup used 2 DVDs and my own, the all 10 pieces of DVD.
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  6. Posts : 10,455
    Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Service Pack 1
       #6

    It's not a good idea to back up to DVD if you have any alternative. DVDs are not very reliable and it only takes one of the set to have problems for the entire set to be useless. Far better to buy a USB attached hard drive for your backups.
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  7. Posts : 13,576
    Windows 10 Pro x64
       #7

    Windows imaging works perfectly and is very flexible, it lets you choose only what you want to backup.
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  8. Posts : 175
    Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
       #8

    kado897 said:
    It's not a good idea to back up to DVD if you have any alternative. DVDs are not very reliable and it only takes one of the set to have problems for the entire set to be useless. Far better to buy a USB attached hard drive for your backups.
    Thank you kado897 for telling me this. I was thinking that DVDs are rather slow and troublesome especially waiting the discs to be finalised. A HDD will be faster.
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  9. whs
    Posts : 26,210
    Vista, Windows7, Mint Mate, Zorin, Windows 8
       #9

    I had a lot of problems with Windows imaging. Free Macrium is a much better choice.
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  10. Posts : 11
    64bit
       #10

    I run Windows backup regularly and it helped me to recover a lost file or two. However, it didn't quite work to backup or restore the whole system or even an individual user account profile.

    Windows Backup does not save my NTUSER.DAT

    "Publisher: unknown" for all MS executables after full system restore

    Looks good on paper, but seem pretty fragile IMO.
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