I am planning to get 2 new computers running Windows 7. I want to do everything right now to prepare for inevitable times when things go wrong.
There are several products on the market both free and paid-for that will take a system image and restore it. Win 7 itself has a built in system image function but I believe its pretty ordinary and extremely slow at backing up.
Thats not to say I want an extraordinarily complicated-feature product either.
I just want something that will backup my entire disc including operating system, MBR etc without me having to tell it what is what to the nth degree (i.e. as straight-forward user friendly as possible), that doesnt need me to go fiddling around changing partition sizes or drive letter names etc etc .
However I do have a question to do with partitions and restoring. Lets say you had a 500GB drive with 150Gb date on it and backed it up. You get a new drive that is 400GB. (unlikely I know but for the purpose of the exercise ) will there be a problem putting back the 150Gb data from the 500Gb image because the new drive is only 400Gb? Is this sort of thing not possible, or possible but only with changing settings of partitions in the restore process? And I presume the answer to this is also dependent upon the software used? Same scenario, but restoring to a larger drive? Thats only about as complicated as I think I could get with having to fiddle with partitions.
I want to store this on a USB external drive rather than CDs or DVDs because I think they are more prone to damage, and also because in the case of an unbootable system, you need to insert a recovery CD in first to prepare the system for restoration via first booting into some recovery options panel from where you select your source, destination and recovery image ..so its nice to have the recovery CD available in the CD drive and the backup elsewhere.
So far Ive looked at Macrium, Acronis True Image, Rollback RX and Shadow Protect. I am now hopelessly confused over which does what. At my local IT shop they told me I could simply backup from the Shadow Protect management console to my USB drive and for disaster recovery all I had to do was put my USB external drive in and boot up from it and it would load the recovery console and from there I would select the backup from the same external drive. However having come home and reading the Shadow Protect website it seems that a recovery CD is supplied which has to be used first, in conjunction with the backup location, it didnt seem to indicate that the whole thing could be loaded from the external drive .is this correct?
I would only be looking at the Desktop version. The guys at the shop would use a Server version and perhaps its different maybe he got mixed up with what he was saying or misunderstood me. He also told me of the function Virtual Boot which is very useful and the Hardware Interface which means you can restore your backup to a completely new hardware system (which is probably one of the scenarios when you would need a full system restore) however if the Windows 7 OS is an OEM, surely this would mean that when loading either the Virtual Boot of the image file, or a backup onto a new computer, that Windows would see that the hardware configuration is not that of the original machine and would need to be re-activated .and if its not on the original machine surely that means ringing Microsoft to pay for a new licence??? Would it all still load but then ask for activation?
OK thats not a deal-breaker for having system image software but it might be a deal-breaker for paying for a brand that has that function built in if you are not going to be able to make use of it ..though its still probably better to be able to load your existing system and pay for a new licence than to do a clean install of Windows which would still need to be licenced, but of course this depends upon how much tweaking and installing has been done on top of the pre-existing Windows system prior to the crash.
So here is what I want to be able to do:
Make a full backup of my system which can easily be restored from an external drive .question here: if I am using a recovery CD to boot up to a recovery console which then has to browse for my USB external drive, how do I know that the driver for my external drive will be loaded by the recovery CD and that my drive will be found and recognised? Or when making the backup to that external drive using the software, does it make note of the driver for the backup destination so it can be re-loaded at recovery boot?
From the backup, I would make incremental backups at intervals.
I want to be able to do 2 things basically:
(1) Do a complete system restore to an earlier time from a system image
(2) Optionally but not 100% necessary as I do data backups anyhow, it would be nice if it had the option to browse for an individual file in a particular dated backup and restore that one file
I assume that once you do a restore of either (1) or (2) that the image file you just restored still remains as a backup on your backup media .
The ability to produce a virtual boot as per Shadow protect would be nice but if its then going to load Windows & ask for activation, not much use.
I suppose the ability to transport the backup to new hardware is pretty important because re-licensing of Windows not withstanding, it would be a pretty useless backup if you couldnt restore it to a new computer or at least not without a lot of pain of getting drivers sorted yes its easy enough to download and install new drivers but depending upon which ones those are, you could end up with a catch-22 situation .if you need to boot the system in order to install new drivers , but you need those new drivers in order to get the system to boot properly
So in short Im trying to avoid all that sort of hassle by getting it right now. Just want to know if you have a very simple backup system image solution which you have used and it works and which can be easily understood and used by a novice.
There are several products on the market both free and paid-for that will take a system image and restore it. Win 7 itself has a built in system image function but I believe its pretty ordinary and extremely slow at backing up.
Thats not to say I want an extraordinarily complicated-feature product either.
I just want something that will backup my entire disc including operating system, MBR etc without me having to tell it what is what to the nth degree (i.e. as straight-forward user friendly as possible), that doesnt need me to go fiddling around changing partition sizes or drive letter names etc etc .
However I do have a question to do with partitions and restoring. Lets say you had a 500GB drive with 150Gb date on it and backed it up. You get a new drive that is 400GB. (unlikely I know but for the purpose of the exercise ) will there be a problem putting back the 150Gb data from the 500Gb image because the new drive is only 400Gb? Is this sort of thing not possible, or possible but only with changing settings of partitions in the restore process? And I presume the answer to this is also dependent upon the software used? Same scenario, but restoring to a larger drive? Thats only about as complicated as I think I could get with having to fiddle with partitions.
I want to store this on a USB external drive rather than CDs or DVDs because I think they are more prone to damage, and also because in the case of an unbootable system, you need to insert a recovery CD in first to prepare the system for restoration via first booting into some recovery options panel from where you select your source, destination and recovery image ..so its nice to have the recovery CD available in the CD drive and the backup elsewhere.
So far Ive looked at Macrium, Acronis True Image, Rollback RX and Shadow Protect. I am now hopelessly confused over which does what. At my local IT shop they told me I could simply backup from the Shadow Protect management console to my USB drive and for disaster recovery all I had to do was put my USB external drive in and boot up from it and it would load the recovery console and from there I would select the backup from the same external drive. However having come home and reading the Shadow Protect website it seems that a recovery CD is supplied which has to be used first, in conjunction with the backup location, it didnt seem to indicate that the whole thing could be loaded from the external drive .is this correct?
I would only be looking at the Desktop version. The guys at the shop would use a Server version and perhaps its different maybe he got mixed up with what he was saying or misunderstood me. He also told me of the function Virtual Boot which is very useful and the Hardware Interface which means you can restore your backup to a completely new hardware system (which is probably one of the scenarios when you would need a full system restore) however if the Windows 7 OS is an OEM, surely this would mean that when loading either the Virtual Boot of the image file, or a backup onto a new computer, that Windows would see that the hardware configuration is not that of the original machine and would need to be re-activated .and if its not on the original machine surely that means ringing Microsoft to pay for a new licence??? Would it all still load but then ask for activation?
OK thats not a deal-breaker for having system image software but it might be a deal-breaker for paying for a brand that has that function built in if you are not going to be able to make use of it ..though its still probably better to be able to load your existing system and pay for a new licence than to do a clean install of Windows which would still need to be licenced, but of course this depends upon how much tweaking and installing has been done on top of the pre-existing Windows system prior to the crash.
So here is what I want to be able to do:
Make a full backup of my system which can easily be restored from an external drive .question here: if I am using a recovery CD to boot up to a recovery console which then has to browse for my USB external drive, how do I know that the driver for my external drive will be loaded by the recovery CD and that my drive will be found and recognised? Or when making the backup to that external drive using the software, does it make note of the driver for the backup destination so it can be re-loaded at recovery boot?
From the backup, I would make incremental backups at intervals.
I want to be able to do 2 things basically:
(1) Do a complete system restore to an earlier time from a system image
(2) Optionally but not 100% necessary as I do data backups anyhow, it would be nice if it had the option to browse for an individual file in a particular dated backup and restore that one file
I assume that once you do a restore of either (1) or (2) that the image file you just restored still remains as a backup on your backup media .
The ability to produce a virtual boot as per Shadow protect would be nice but if its then going to load Windows & ask for activation, not much use.
I suppose the ability to transport the backup to new hardware is pretty important because re-licensing of Windows not withstanding, it would be a pretty useless backup if you couldnt restore it to a new computer or at least not without a lot of pain of getting drivers sorted yes its easy enough to download and install new drivers but depending upon which ones those are, you could end up with a catch-22 situation .if you need to boot the system in order to install new drivers , but you need those new drivers in order to get the system to boot properly
So in short Im trying to avoid all that sort of hassle by getting it right now. Just want to know if you have a very simple backup system image solution which you have used and it works and which can be easily understood and used by a novice.