Can you use Windose 10 backup on locked and system files?

Can I use that as a fast and dirty method of restoring damaged files or am I pretty much stuck on full drive recovery if I want to deal with the OS itself?

I use macrium reflect to make the drive backups, can you use those to restore just the OS folders and not every little thing?

dalchina said:

The point of disk imaging is to allow you to restore a consistent working environment as was. You can't possibly select part of an image- say 50%- and achieve that. You restore the whole registry, so everything has to match that, for example. And there's so much more...

Trying to work out what you might want selectively from an image to give you a correct and reliable system would take you much much longer than simply restoring the image- and would be a complete waste of time trying.

(You can mount image files and extract individual files - but that's completely different to what you want).

I dunno I've managed to fix a broken windows OS by dumping files and folders into it, mainly the windows folder itself, never had something like the DISM to check and restore current items tho but its not 100%, so I could in theory use a VM to maintain the OS and basic profiles in a VM off a disk image, if the main OS goes bad or quirky I'd at least have a live image to use to refresh the current OS.

Also has anyone made a program that will properly import information from a profile to a new profile? Doing it manfully has become a pain in win10...

Right now since the last big update defender is running all the time(gives an error when you shut it off) and my programs and OS are sluggish and iffy. That last update is a killer....

dalchina said:

Sorry, I have to completely disagree with your maintenance approach.

I find Avast preferable in its negligible use of system resources. I've seen Defender behave like that.


No.. and it sounds as if this is something you're doing repeatedly. That shouldn't be the case and points to sthg else wrong.

Avast is pretty decent, kasversky with firewall,ect dose not take up much more, but defender yikes its rough and has false positives like crazy. I prefer kasversky since it dose false positives less than most.


Just a thought mind you, was hoping for a faster solution than go back to the image, I hard reboot now and then from crashes or stuck programs(can't alt tab away,ect) or the USB driver giving me crap but it happens 2-10 times a year I have clean image backup with the profile made and basic things installed. Hard reboots degrade the system combine that with funky updates that should be treated as SP patches or more very optional feature updates as they come with more "features" than anything else..


So basically the best thing is use the image, okay I'll go with that then.