Imaging with free Macrium

Britton30 said:

As WHS said, you are in overkill. If you image the recovery partition you also will have all the factory bloatware, trial software, and general crap, like the HP tools which do what w7 already has tools for.

The simple answer is image the entire drive, it will be highly compressed and may not be more than 100GB. I have an OS image which is 9.34GB, and the OS is a bit over 20GB.

To find info on this forum, click on Search at the top and type in your query in the Standard Search (Google) field.

i know , thats why i tried to clean reinstall OS . but in case if we sell the unit to someONe who is not an IT related person, just he use to recover laptop by pressing f11 and no need for updated drivers , then this scenario will prompt me to do this action . thats it . and hey i didn't know about less image back up size, how can we make image backup of OS up to 9.34 GB or even up to 20 GB or 30GB . because i donot wanna retain myself to keep highly big image size of these OS .

mjf said:

salluhassan said:

but where are the related threads to whom i was expecting some help to restore images so as to achieve the look of just like factory installed partitions .??

Find the Macrium tutorial by WHS. The MBR stores the partition structure so when you restore a recovery partition you just select the partition it belongs in (generally up the front).
If you can find the money then a little 500GB external HDD would be a good investment. I still think imaging recovery etc is a good idea but you would image your OS partition on a more regular basis.

Once you have recovery images you may want to convert your OS partition to logical and create 2 logical partitions - one OS and one data so that your OS image will always be quite small. This is something to think about down the track.

well i am not so prone to start regular basis scheduled back ups of OS , not very much case sensitive .besides i have not so much important data to worry about .and thanks , i will find the threads related to user whs . and if i need help regarding concepts of master boot record MBR related to partition and back up images then i will let you know .

I've used Macrium Reflect Free repeatedly when I totally bork my Win7 partition on my dual-boot C: drive and it's a lifesaver.

I did have a question about how many images the Free version can save on another drive or partition. I recently had to use the latest (Dec 20 2012) image I had to restore my hard drive, and everything went well. This evening, I ran the program and saved today's drive image on another internal hard drive as I always do. When I was done, I looked in the folder and that one freshly created image was the only one there. My older three images including the Dec. 20 2012 one were gone. Vanished.

I ran Recuva with Deep Scan on that drive and came up empty. No older images at all. Very strange, so I'm wondering where the setting is in the Free version to keep images longer than 14 days, or to enable me to save more than three images. I could have sworn that at one time I had five, but maybe the latest Macrium update changed the number.

Well, since I had troubles saving opened spreadsheet files stored on that same hard drive, methinks the drive is starting to crap out. I guess I'd better save what I can and go drive shopping. <sighs>