Help with creating a system image backup

Well windows crashed a few days ago and was unwilling to let me get it back up running again, so I'm on a fresh install more or less. I will just try to use marcium to make a back up without any games installed. I just need to install a few programs first. Will come back here with the results.

simrick said:

Hi.
As stated above, I wouldn't use a flash drive. I'd get a proper external hard drive to do this. You want to have several images, in case one gets corrupted in the future.

I have two usb flashdrives and plan to put an image on both of them.

simrick said:

Can you put your games/libraries on a separate partition? If so, then your C/OS partition size would be drastically reduced. That way, imaging it would be a lot faster. You can figure an image will be about half the size of the original (give or take).

Yes, I could, but wouldn't I have to format my SSD first?

SIW2 said:

There are a few imaging programs that will exclude files/ folders from an image. O&O diskimage ( not free ), partition guru ( can do it with pguru free version but manually, there is no built in scheduling. )

Probably the best free solution for that is paragon backup and recovery.

Thanks, will check it out.

cereberus said:

Create a second partition and move portable games to second partition.

Format usb drive as ntfs

Create image backup using macrium reflect free to back up all partitions EXCEPT partition containing portable games.

This is a good suggestion, is there any benefits from using a partion for windows and another partion for games, other than making it easier to create an image backup?

NavyLCDR said:

But don't forget...you also need a rescue drive/disk to restore the backup if needed.

What do you mean?

Cerawy said:

This is a good suggestions, is there any benefits from using a partion for windows and another partion for games, other than making it easier to create an image backup?



What do you mean?

It is easier to keep image backup under control. Other partition can be backed up by normal file backup tools, or even simply copying using file explorer.

You need a bootable flash drive or dvd containing Reflect Rescue software. You can create a boot entry so you only need drive if the actual hard drive fails or is badly corrupted.

NavyLCDR, you're right as rain! I learned from long ago experience to create two things:
1) Both USB and DVD boots of the backup / restore / cloning program, portable version
2) Make routine backups, full images, of each of my computers' OS and Data partitions

ignatzatsonic said:

You say you are going to "create a backup image now".

Suppose you do that.

Suppose 10 minutes later your hard drive drops dead.

What's your next step? How do you propose to take advantage of that image you just made?

Buy another SSD and use the backup image I suppose? Isn't that the whole point of taking backup?

Edit: Ok, so macrium just got done creating the image. The installation was a bit weird, I first had to download a program that would then download macrium (took a long time) and it would then install on windows. But macrium has created a single backup file that fits nicely to my usb flash drives.

ignatzatsonic said:

We don't know what you mean by "use". Please clarify with detail.

I want to restore my windows installation, if windows crashes and refuses to recover using windows own build in tools. This actually happened a few days ago. Windows didn't want to use any of the system recovery tools that is included with windows. So I had to reinstall windows and had to start with a fresh install all over again. I want to avoid this situation.

ignatzatsonic said:

You certainly can't boot from that image file. It's just a file sitting over there on some hard drive. May as well be a picture of an aardvark.

Yep, I just tried to boot from the macrium backup file. Didn't work. Completely useless, will try some of the other programs.

P.S this is my first time taking backup so I may make several mistakes.