Backup and Restore with Windows Built-in

[huffman]

First I did not know where to post this and next let me describe my system:

It is barebones called Windsys that I built a few months ago.
1.6GHz
2.00 Gb ram
32 bit system
300 Gb Sata Drive that is partitioned into three partitions
There are NO ide connections in this computer, everything is USB.

I have been playing around imaging programs with Acronis 11 being the main one. Ghost 2003 does not like usb, so I did not bother with it.

The way I image is to make two images, one for C-drive and one for D-drive. Acronis is slow from what I am used to. To make the C-drive image on one of the partitions on an external drive took 1 hour and 20 minutes. Compression was from 10.1 to 8.1 gb. To restore that C-drive image took 2 hours and 30 minutes. I know usb can slow things down but that seems ridiculous.

Then I tried Windows 7 imaging built-in. It did much better timewise than Acronis. The thing was or maybe I am wrong, I use images to assure that the system is running properly so when I have one good image, then I make a second good image, then delete the first image. What I did not expect was that Windows 7 imaging program would not let me make the second image (C-drive) without deleting the first image (C-drive) before hand.

I have all kinds of room and why I could not make the second image baffles me, makes no sense at all.

If someone can shed some light on this I would appreciate it. Thank you.

 

[DJG]

One of the reasons I ended using Paragon's Drive Backup over Acronis several years ago was speed. It takes me about 17 minutes to image my notebook's 23GB C drive to the other partition (I then copy it to an external or network drive). In my workstation it takes me less than 2 minutes to image my current 19GB RAID 0 C drive to another RAID 10 disk.