Backup User and System Files

brink,

im sorry if you answered this already but i had a problem with this backup before and gave up and used macrium. i want to give windows 7 back up another go..

on my secondary hard drive i created a partition thats 30GB, i figured that was enough for me if i only do monthly backups and just delete the old one after a new backup was done. i successful completely a backup and its only 2.11GB in size.

if i had a complete hard drive failure on my primary hard drive that holds my C drive and 100MB of system reserved. will these backups do anything for me. like would i be able to reload windows 7 to the point in which that backup was created on a secondary drive.

if not as i suspect, then whats the point? i see something about a system image? thats probably something i wanna do. i skip that step when i was doing the backup..

looks like i have to create a system image backup, is there no compression to this system image backup, my C drive has about 40GB being used and for the system image backup it needs that amount of space.. i guess its physically copying everything to that image.. how would this ever be put on a CD or DVD then..

Brink said:

Hello Eldinv,

You are correct. You would need to create a system image instead to be able to restore Windows 7 with it to how it was when the image was created. Unfortunately, there is very little compression for the backup system image file.

It could take quite a few DVDs if they were used instead. This would be why using a HDD or another partition would be preferred and more reliable. The system image is a complete copy of the selected drives.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thanks again for the reply, guess i have to stick with macrium... i cant believe the system image file cant be better compressed...such a waste of hard drive space. i can copy the whole c drive including data and the back file is only a fraction of space. i dont know whats going on, what do u suggest.

Hello!
Is there any way to change the default limit of 30% of disk space for backups? I keep my backups on a 1TB hard drive, and definitely don't want them to use over 300 GB.
Also, as I can see, Windows only makes incremental backups for several days, then it creates a new full backup. Is there any way to automatically delete the previous full backup after a new one is made? This would be a better alternative to changing the backup size limit.

Thanks for your fast reply!
I'd try the program, just had to make sure this was not possible with built-in B&R utility.

Good info here! Thanks!
To be sure I'm clear on one of the topics:
I like to regularly back up my photo files to 2 external hdd's. I think I saw that they cannot be done simultaneously? Would it be easier to just do a manual 'Backup Now' for each, as opposed to setting up 2 different backup jobs? Or better yet perhaps, how would you suggest I do it?
Oh, and I don't keep my externals powered on until I want to do a backup.
I've tried one third party backup program - Lacie - hated how it worked and found it easier to just copy the new stuff/changes to my externals.
I hope that makes sense. :)