New
#11
Oh yeah, I was semi-aware of that. I've been using AOMEI to create images but.....knock on wood....I've never had to RESTORE an image. It's a scary thought of restoring an image to a drive and the actual data (videos, mp3's, doc's, etc.) not be overwritten or otherwise effected! But, I guess these backup software do it w/o issues...
In the end, you have to take a leap of faith that a restore will work.
If you are using PRO, you can actually mount an image backup in hyper-v as a virtual machine using Macrium Viboot. That is a good way to test backup.
It is possible to do similar on Home using VMware or virtual box but more complicated as you have to boot in VM from a Macrium Rescue iso, and restore image to a virtual drive etc. In the end, it does same thing but nowhere near as slick as using viboot.
Of course, another simple way to check if a restore will be fine is to restore to a spare hard disk and check that works ok.
That's a bit beyond my level! I need as idiot proof as possible. Currently I image the 60GB W7 OS drive (see disk Management screenshot in post #7) & if anything goes wrong I can restore that image w/ no risk of data loss. Most data is stored on the 1TB HDD.
If I choose system backup in AOMEI it automatically selects "system reserved" D: (from the 60GB SSD w/ W7 OS) and the entire 500GB Samsung SSD with W10 OS on it. The reason I thought to create a partition (of 60GB or so) on the Samsung 500GB SSD w/ just W10 OS on it is I could then image that and restore if need be w/o effecting or risk of losing data that would be stored on the rest of the drive/other partition (400GB ish).
Otherwise it's all one drive/partition w/ potentially 20GB of W10 OS + 300-400GB of data so even compressing 320-420GB the image would pretty large. My concern is W10 horror stories of regular update problems possibly requiring reinstallation of W10. This makes sense to me but I'm not well versed in this area!