System Image Recovery

jgl6008 said:

Thanks for the help. Sounds like I have some good options to work with.
Just for curiosity, can some one answer the question I had previously about Windows System Image Backup:
does it do incremental backups rather than a full one each time, or are System Image backups are created much like system backups where the folder name represents a 'backup period' and Windows decides when a full system image backup will be created.
John L.

Hello John,

When you create a system image, it will be saved as a backup period that is a new full system image each time created. :)

Backup Complete Computer - Create an Image Backup

It is both.

The vhd you can see does indeed contain a complete image of your drive(s) as at the time you made the image, as Shawn mentioned.

However, the way it does that is very clever.

During the first image, blocks containing data are copied into a .vhd file. VHD files do not support compression ( there is some compaction ) , so it will be big.

The next time a system image is created, only new and changed data is written to the .vhd file. Old data is moved out of the VHD and into the shadow copy storage area.

When restoring the latest image, blocks will be restored from the vhd to their original locations. When restoring from an earlier image, unchanged blocks are read and restored from the vhd and earlier versions ( changed blocks ) come from the shadow copy area.

So what it is really doing when you select an earlier image is fishing out the earlier versions ( only blocks that have changed ) from where it moved them to in shadow storage, and getting blocks that have not changed from the current visible vhd file.

That is clever, because the shadow storage takes less space, and that is how it can drop earlier versions without impacting on newer images.

Periodically it starts from scratch and makes a new complete image. I don't know how it decides when to do that.

A personal View for Windows System Images:
The use of shadow storage to store the difference images allows you to access (rebuild) older images as stated but I consider it a bit more risky because it relies on shadow storage. I prefer to make (pristine) once off images then
1) rename them (like in the tutorial)
and/or
2) Move them to a folder (within the same partition they were made)
or
3) delete them

Yes, you can do that, takes quite a bit of space, though.

I had a bit of fun restoring images to different partitions via command line. It won't boot up if you do that, so you have to make a couple of adjustments. I was expecting them to get to the welcome screen before trouble, but strangely, I got autochk errors and bsods. Easy enough to fix.

So Shawn as I am having a few well quite a lot of annoying issues - slowing down and losing posts in SF, Windows Explorer stopping, IE stopping / not responding etc etc with my main machine does the fact that the images are stored on an external 500GB drive mean I cannot do this to a 256GB SSD C: drive?

My alternative would be to do a complete clean reinstall and all that hanging around on updates and drivers galore.

I have thrown every scan and test I can think of at the thing but it seems like either it is a bad drive or something is toying with the machine. But if a clean install is the only answer then I'll do it just to be back to normal

May be best to bite the bullet and clean install.

Brink said:

May be best to bite the bullet and clean install.

Ok mate I was rather thinking that would be the best thing to do rather than fiddle around the bits and pieces.
I suppose I can recover my programs and data stuff from the external anyway.
For example could I just copy / paste My Documents or the whole of Users form the external to the new install??

Yep, that wouldn't be a problem to do.

Brink said:

Yep, that wouldn't be a problem to do.

Ok mate I will do that then:)