Help with creating a system image backup

I assume you want to create an image of your C partition, store it on a 64 GB USB flash drive, and later be able to restore that image from that drive to an internal hard drive. Do I have that right?

How much space is occupied on C?

Are your games also installed on C?

Generally--system images are of an ENTIRE partition, not parts of it.

I think there are imaging applications that at least contend they can EXCLUDE portions of a partition, but I don't know how well that works out in actual practice.

Additionally--I would not have major faith in any image file placed on a USB flash drive. Those things are so fragile and flaky that I wouldn't count on one for anything serious. I've had them fall apart into 2 pieces in my hands. Better than nothing, but that's about it.

A system image created by 'Backup & Restore (Windows 7)' can only be stored on an ntfs partition, so a USB memory stick would have to be formatted as ntfs. A better (safer) media to store system images would be an external USB HDD (where storage wouldn't be an issue anyway). An even better solution would to use another imaging solution entirely (Macrium Reflect is often recommended on these boards). Even Microsoft now say so...

Microsoft said:

System Image Backup (SIB) Solution
We recommend that users use full-disk backup solutions from other vendors.

Features removed or Deprecated in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

ignatzatsonic said:

I assume you want to create an image of your C partition, store it on a 64 GB USB flash drive, and later be able to restore that image from that drive to an internal hard drive. Do I have that right?

Correct.

ignatzatsonic said:

How much space is occupied on C?

146GB

ignatzatsonic said:

Are your games also installed on C?

Yes.

ignatzatsonic said:

I would not have major faith in any image file placed on a USB flash drive. Those things are so fragile and flaky that I wouldn't count on one for anything serious. I've had them fall apart into 2 pieces in my hands. Better than nothing, but that's about it.

This is a non-issue because I have 2 usb sticks so if one of them breaks I got the other one.

146 GB used on C.

An image file of that using Macrium would normally be in the range of 60 to 80 GB; maybe a bit less, maybe a bit more. You won't know until you make the file.

That's with standard compression. You could use a higher compression level, but as I recall that won't reduce the size a whole lot. You'd have to experiment to know for sure.

I'd suggest that your 64 GB stick is too small for comfort. It may not even hold one image file now and it certainly would not if you expect that 146 GB to grow in the future.

My C occupies about 31 GB; my most recent image of it resulted in a 15.6 GB file--almost exactly half the size of the occupied space. Half of 146 is 73. You might get lucky in your case, but I wouldn't count on it.

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.

Cerawy said:

I'm looking for help to create a system image backup on my 64GB usb drive. The problem is that I have a lot of games that takes a lot of space. I want to create a system image backup without the games so I can put it on my 64GB usb drive. I also want the system backup image to be one file, instead of multiple files.

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.

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