Make a image

Yes but it goes by the name of Windows 7 backup for some strange reason. It's unreliable to say the least & many people including myself use Macrium Reflect to create images & clones of our hard drives.

Some people have luck with the Windows Imaging software that comes with Windows. Most people prefer a 3rd party app like Macrium Reflect, Acronis or Easeus Todo Backup.
For Windows, Go to Settings/Update and Security/Backup/Go to Backup and Restore (Windows 7) on the left panel, choose Create a System Image.

Ben Daniels said:

I have Reflect but I am dumb and have trouble with it working to restore. I make a boot dsk and image my computer to a external hd but I am not doing something right

Perhaps you should format the drive to work with NTFS if it has not already been set?

I have had success with the sdclt.exe utility (Control Panel\System and Security\Backup and Restore (Windows 7)\Create System Image) and it restores my images correctly with a system repair disk.

Go to tutorials for excellent guide

Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect Windows 10 Backup Restore Tutorials

Bree said:

I am one of those. The trick to getting it to work reliably seems to be not to try to do anything too out of the ordinary. DON'T try renaming the backup image - you may be tempted to in order to keep multiple images. Renaming, copying or moving images is a recipe for making them unrecognised when you come to restore them. This (the failure to recognise a restorable image) is it's main failing.

For a reliable restore, you should make the boot media at the same time and on the same system as you imaged. If you have a CD/DVD drive, you can take the option to make a boot CD that it offers at the end of making the image. If you want a boot USB you have to make that separately. Make a Recovery Drive USB, it has the same software on it as the boot CD would have.

After making the image, boot from your recovery media and get as far as finding the image to restore. The restore itself seems reliable, if you can find the image it should restore without a problem.

What I find works best is instead of renaming the backup files, I store them in a new directory and Windows does not seem to detect that or cause any further issues, however obviously if you do keep multiple backups on one point of storage - you can lose all the backups even easier.

IF you're trying to save money, create directories and move the WindowsImageBackup into a new folder with a differing name.
Otherwise, buy a new HDD.
Works every time.

Bree said:

Yes, there are ways and means that work, but they are fraught with hidden dangers, mostly to do with the volume shadow copies that are made at the same time. It's these that seem to be the root of losing track of the images, though experimenting hasn't pinned down the exact mechanism. One thing that definitely kills most (if not all) previous Win10 images is to save a Win7 image to the same WindowsImageBackup folder.

As such, for someone using Backup & Restore to make system images for the first time, the best advice is not to try to do anything it wasn't designed for. Don't mess with it and it should work reliably.

That's something I learned. I do not plan to keep a Windows 7 installation anywhere, I'm all about the Windows 10 life now. I've moved on from that.

So is it proven that a Windows 7 and Windows 10 image backup on the same hard disk drive in different directories causes faults or has this not been proven?