Back up: basic help needed!

[mercurius]

Hi all,
You previously were kind enough to help me with an issue being caused by Avast eating up my back up drive space. So, I'm back again with another request.

I have got myself in a bit of a pickle about backing up. I have an external drive and have set up the Windows 7 back up procedure. All that seems to do is take a system image which I can't access unless (I assume) I need to restore it. That's all the back up I have.

So my questions are:
- what should I be doing?
- should I have a recovery disk? (don't really know what that is)
- how do I manage all this, eg in terms of frequency, etc.?

I'm not too keen on using 3rd party software for back ups.

I'm concerned that I'm not full protected at the moment, so would be grateful for your advice.

Thank you.

 

[Pauly]

Taking a system image will create a copy of your entire windows with all the info that is on that drive, although you cannot see the data it is all there and is accessible if required, this tutorial shows you how to extract files if required
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...tract-files-using-disk-management.html?filter


Have a look at the backup & restore section of the tutorials for lots of handy guides to all things backup like this for example
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...reate-incremental-backup-shortcut.html?filter

 

[whs]

In addition to Pauly's excellent answer I suggest you take a new image every time there is a significant change in the system - either a major set of system updates or significant changes in you user data.

 

[RolandJS]

If you ever decide to try a 3rd party OS image maker and restorer, there are several very good free and fee, Macrium Reflect [free & fee] and Acronis True Image [fee].