Creating system image questions.

[gregrocker]

I keep the images for 5 home computers on an external, in a folder named for each computer along with it's latest data backup.

In order to keep more than one backup in a folder I sometimes rename extension to .earlier, .older, .baseline, etc.

When time comes to use one of the renamed Images, I rename it to WindowsImageBackup and place it alone in the root of the external. This has worked about a dozen times or so.

 

[Night Hawk]

By default the recovery while booted live will be looking for the assigned name. The renaming simply allows you to store more then one image in case you want to revert back to an earlier one.

When having two separate locations with both seeing the default name on different drives the recovery went to the drive with the lowest number in the order of drives installed first. The second newer was on Drive #1 while the first was on the Sata III on the channel #4 Sata III primary port but seen as Drive #0 by the tool showing it as the recommended image.

 

[usbhubman]

I usually install my OS, windows update and activate and make 1 vanilla image right there. Then, about once per month I take another image of the drive. I usually only keep that vanilla image and the latest month. I don't see myself ever wanting or needed to go back to some point in the middle.

My Windows 7 install took 8.6G by the time I got rid of the PageFile, Hiberfil and some other garbage. Everything I want including Office 2010 fits right now in about 16 G. That means Acronis can back it up in less than 60 seconds. That means I do backups. Every day. My wife's machine has 64G on her C drive and it takes 47 minutes across a USB link. I'm lucky if I do a backup on her machine once a month. My first PC was an 8086 and even then I did backups on 360K floppies. Backups have saved my bacon on more occasions than I care to remember.



The best backup is the one you make. And it's only as good as the last one!

 

[tcat7]

What do you mean by "...place it alone in the root of the HD"? If I have an image on an external drive, and my OD drive craps out... I buy a new drive. How do I move the image to "its root"? I assume I boot of the recovery disk, and I should see both the new drive and my external. I assume the recovery disk leads you through the recovery process.

Or... if I have a 250 gb partition on my other internal (1T) drive that a copy of the image is backed up to, can I just make that my OS? Hopefully will never have the need to know... but want to be sure I have back-ups in the right place.

I keep the images for 5 home computers on an external, in a folder named for each computer along with it's latest data backup.

In order to keep more than one backup in a folder I sometimes rename extension to .earlier, .older, .baseline, etc.

When time comes to use one of the renamed Images, I rename it to WindowsImageBackup and place it alone in the root of the HD. This has worked about a dozen times or so.

 

[gregrocker]

Sorry, typo. Yes, place WindowsImageBackup in root of external where it can be detected easily by the Repair Disk or DVD Repair console "Recover Using a System Image" utility.

When I have it in a folder, it isn't detected.

 

[Night Hawk]

I usually install my OS, windows update and activate and make 1 vanilla image right there. Then, about once per month I take another image of the drive. I usually only keep that vanilla image and the latest month. I don't see myself ever wanting or needed to go back to some point in the middle.

My Windows 7 install took 8.6G by the time I got rid of the PageFile, Hiberfil and some other garbage. Everything I want including Office 2010 fits right now in about 16 G. That means Acronis can back it up in less than 60 seconds. That means I do backups. Every day. My wife's machine has 64G on her C drive and it takes 47 minutes across a USB link. I'm lucky if I do a backup on her machine once a month. My first PC was an 8086 and even then I did backups on 360K floppies. Backups have saved my bacon on more occasions than I care to remember.



The best backup is the one you make. And it's only as good as the last one!

Welcome to the Seven Forums! usbhubman My first came out back in 1982 being a notebook using microcassette tapes where you backed up programs you wrote with a second tape recorder.

The first desktop here was an IBM 386 model with Dos/3.1 and nothing but those old 5.25s to work with! Try backing up a 200mb hard drive on how many of those?!

The ideal best image nowadays is when you have what you need on and everything is working as it should for a clean install first image to be followed by updated images when you quite a bit more added on the main drive. But that first clean install image besides extra files added later will get you back running again.

In addition to images other forms of backups are also a good idea to keep in mind since the drive the image is stored on could fail or the image could be corrupted in some way. Multiple images on more then one drive as well removable media for personal files can really get you out of situation!