Windows 7 Image Backup

[LavCat]

I want to back up Windows 7 to an external hard drive. I would like to make an image backup, so that I can restore my OS to a bare drive if necessary.

The Windows 7 Backup program looks nice, but from what I have read Windows 7 Backup will not work with FAT partitions. Does anyone know of any image backup software that runs under Windows 7 64 Professional and works with FAT partitions? I'm not trying to back up to a FAT partition, I just need to include my system partition which is FAT16.


Edit: I tested Windows 7 Backup, and indeed it does *not* work with FAT partitions.

Meanwhile I have been reading about Macrium. Does anyone have experience with Macrium?

[--Pete]

Hi,

I want to back up Windows 7 to an external hard drive. I would like to make an image backup, so that I can restore my OS to a bare drive if necessary.

The Windows 7 Backup program looks nice, but from what I have read Windows 7 Backup will not work with FAT partitions. Does anyone know of any image backup software that runs under Windows 7 64 Professional and works with FAT partitions? I'm not trying to back up to a FAT partition, I just need to include my system partition which is FAT16.


Edit: I tested Windows 7 Backup, and indeed it does *not* work with FAT partitions.

Meanwhile I have been reading about Macrium. Does anyone have experience with Macrium?

I haven't used it, but EASEUS Todo Backup received a good review from Windows Secrets. It's freeware, so you might give it a whirl -- I'm tempted to, since I'm presently using the Windows backup on XP.

EDIT: I checked, and it looks as if this program WILL work with FAT partitions.

BTW, Win7, worth updating from XP? Micro$squish has a family pack, 3 licenses for $150 -- Home Edition. Worthwhile or no?

--Pete

[LavCat]

I haven't used it, but EASEUS Todo Backup received a good review from Windows Secrets. It's freeware, so you might give it a whirl -- I'm tempted to, since I'm presently using the Windows backup on XP.

EDIT: I checked, and it looks as if this program WILL work with FAT partitions.

BTW, Win7, worth updating from XP? Micro$squish has a family pack, 3 licenses for $150 -- Home Edition. Worthwhile or no?

--Pete

I had looked at EASEUS as well, but from what I can tell from the websites and from a few reviews, I like Macrium better (never having used either program). For one thing the paid version of Macrium includes a real copy of Windows PE, unlike EASEUS or the free version of Macrium. And from looking at the forums Macrium provides good technical support. I also like the 30 day unconditional guarantee.

The paid version of Macrium will do full disc restores from the Windows PE environment. The free version of of Macrium does only partition by partition restores unless you are running the program from Windows on a hard drive. Not sure about EASEUS.

As for Windows 7, I like it. I am using 64 Professional. Previously I had been using XP on this machine. It took a long time to get Windows 7 configured as I wanted it (namely to look like Windows NT) but it was worth it. WoW and most applications run well. I would say WoW runs better than on XP. On the downside some of my older hardware is not supported and some older software (such as Acrobat 5) does not install. I have Windows XP running in a Windows 7 VM, but that is a bit of a kluge.

My complaints with Windows 7 are minor -- not counting that it doesn't back up FAT: the shortcut overlay cannot be removed from icons, and they got rid of the share overlay (the little open hand).

[Concillian]

I just boot with a linux live CD (like Knoppix, there are others. Anything works)

Figure out which drive is which (usually sda and sdb, but you need to verify which is empty and which is full). Then unmount both.
Then open a terminal window and type

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096

(where sda is the verified source drive and sdb is the verified target drive)

Doesn't matter what OS is on the drive. Works for Windows, mac, anything. This does a bit by bit copy of the entire drive, including MBR.
Also works to upgrade a hard drive on a windows machine to a larger one. Copy the image, then use the built in Windows partition tool to expand the partition to fill the new, larger, drive.

There are commercial softwares that essentially do the same thing, but with a nicer UI. I know people in IT who use commercial applications and others who work for a smaller company who just use Linux to do it. The end result is the same, you're paying for the UI with commercial software. All applications have the same risk of data loss.

It copies about as fast as you can for a mechanical drive. Last time I did it, it was about 50 or 60 MB / sec, which is about as fast as you'll get for a mechanical drive. Still, even what is now a pretty small drive (320 GB) takes a couple hours.

I do this about once every couple months for my fileserver, then I take the drive to work so if there's a fire or something at my housee, I don't lose home videos and pictures and such. You can do it over USB, but it's slower. If it's done overnight, that's probably not a huge issue. I also did it last month when I updated my wife's machine to get her old data on another drive in case she forgot to tell me about something she needed (and she did). Then I could comfortably wipe her drive and start fresh. It's not the easiest thing to do, but it's hard to argue with the price. Once you do it a couple times, it's really pretty simple.


Pete -- the current offer is pretty good if you're going to upgrade. Win7 has one game performance related feature that XP doesn't (DirectX11 support) and eventually they will stop making security updates for XP like they stopped Win2k this year. $50 / license is a good deal, and Win7 will have support for 10 years or so.

The UI changes take some time getting used to, and I didn't find a huge functionality improvement. But it's a decent OS and if you're not forced into Win7, then you'll be forced into the successor. At that point, the question is if you think $50 per license is something that will be available at another time you'll be ready to update. Personally, I doubt they will offer incentives to move people when they're forced to move because of discontinuing support, so it may be a decent decision to update now, even if you don't really want or need to.