Solved How much of my external drive does Windows disc image use?

[cbiweb]

Currently I use an external drive for nightly backups of my files. If I create a disc image with the Windows utility, will it use the entire external drive for the image, or will it only use a portion of it, therefore preserving my nightly backups?

 

[Gary]

When I image my system it uses around 100GB of disk space. I have a 1TB external disk and I have about 4 different images plus some other stuff and still have about 1/2 of it available.

Welcome to the forum BTW

 

[cbiweb]

Thanks for the reply and the welcome, Gary.

Sounds good then. It's been many years since I made any disk images, and at the time I used Norton Ghost which would use the entire storage disk, wiping out anything else that was on it. That's why I wanted to check and make sure with Windows own utility.

 

[mjf]

If you subtract the size of your pagefile.sys plus hyperfil.sys then that is about the size you will need for system images. Other programs like Macrium Reflect also provide some compression (upwards of 50%) will give you the size.
If you include MS file/folder backup then you could add a lot more (depending on what data you place in your documents, Music Pictures ....)