Windows 7 Backup & Recovery VS Acronis, Paragon, etc!

[bht]

Hi

I would be interested to hear views concerning reliability of the built in Backup & Recovery facility, within Windows 7, compared to third party offerings!

I am especially interested in backing up the Operating System (not personal data)

 

[marsmimar]

I've never had any problems with the native Windows 7 imaging tool. Others will tell you it's garbage and can't be trusted. So just to play it safe I image with Windows 7 and Macrium free to different external hard drives.

 

[Mark Phelps]

I am especially interested in backing up the Operating System (not personal data)

Don't know of any easy way to use the imaging programs to PREVENT user data from being included in the image.

There might be a way, but what I've found to be a better approach over the years is to keep most of my data on a separate partition, such that when I run image backups of the OS partition, I'm including very little user data.

 

[kado897]

I've never had any problems with the native Windows 7 imaging tool. Others will tell you it's garbage and can't be trusted. So just to play it safe I image with Windows 7 and Macrium free to different external hard drives.

I am especially interested in backing up the Operating System (not personal data)

Don't know of any easy way to use the imaging programs to PREVENT user data from being included in the image.

There might be a way, but what I've found to be a better approach over the years is to keep most of my data on a separate partition, such that when I run image backups of the OS partition, I'm including very little user data.

The way I do it is to put all my data on other partitions and to collect everything together with libraries just leaving the original locations for programs that insist on using them.