A inquiry about restoring a system backup

Hello and welcome Legoboy mate if you scroll right down to the bottom of that tutorial it gives ayou a lot of related tutorials see pic

Ok mate now if you think the hard drive might be broken or is breaking then the system image is just that an image of how the system is right now.

I get the impression you have some concern about the hard drive you have right now if so just what is making you think that?

Are you getting SMART warnings? Or, are some of the known-good software programs acting strange?

Are you getting SMART warnings?

Nice point and going back to your query re about having 7 with a broken drive well that is not possible.

I made a little tutorial which may help understand the process:

Imaging with free Macrium

Legoboy0215 said:

For example, if my hard drive is broken, I won't have my Win 7 right? Do I just plug my Backup drive in?

No.

You must "restore" your backup from your backup drive to a known good (possible brand new) drive. That's a formal process. You can't just plug in the backup drive.

Until it's "restored", the backup isn't of much use. It won't boot Windows.

If you made a "clone" of your original hard drive (instead of an image), that cloned hard drive WOULD be bootable and you could just plug it in and start the PC. You'd clone your existing hard drive and then put the cloned drive into the closet until your existing hard drive broke down.

But that's not what Windows Backup does and it's not what most people want to do when they make a "backup". Cloning and imaging are 2 different things. Imaging is generally thought of as a proper backup while cloning is not. Cloning is most often used when things are going well and you just want to move your existing Windows installation to a new, probably larger, hard drive.

Don't stake your life on either cloning or imaging. They usually work and sometimes don't.

Legoboy0215 said:

The problem is, when I back it up to an external HD, what if I need to restore it? Ex: If my current HD failed,....

You follow this tutorial
System Image Recovery
1) If your existing HDD fails then using the inbuilt Windows imaging you must restore the image using this tutorial to a new HDD at least as large as the original HDD you made the image from. (Macrium (see below) doesn't have this limitation)
2) Also you must make a system Repair CD and boot from that again following the tutorial.
3) Make sure you can boot to the CD and locate the image on the external drive. If you can locate it then you should be ok. When replacing an old or failed HDD just take it out of the antistatic bag and plug it in with no other internal HDD connected.
4) If you have a USB 3 external HDD for storing the system image then you will need to install the USB 3 drivers after you boot the system repair CD.
Problem recoverying from backup via USB 3.0 external drive

I've done this numerous times BUT it is a bit involved and Windows inbuilt imaging is not as flexible as (free) Macrium Reflect. It is relatively simple to use. You need to create a Restore pe CD (sort of like the Windows System Repair CD). If you make the pe 5 restore CD then the USB 3 drivers should be automatically loaded. Just note that booting from the restore CD/DVD takes some time so be a little patient. Macrium is my choice.