Please back up your OS!!

Hi!! I'm running W7.  I know this is an old topic, but I don't think it can be posted to much.
I just recently bought  a laptop with W7. It not only has a feature that will allow you to restore back to out of the box, but has a great feature to back up your OS as often as you want. I decided to test it out. I made a backup image of my OS on my external HD. I then restored my PC to the date I made the image. It restored perfectly. Not one thing is missing.
What a great way to get rid of infections. Just keep a image that you know is not infected and restore to it.
I try to keep a image that is a month old that I can restore to. That pretty much assures me it's not infected (99.99%). Nothing is 100% in the computer world. I figure I should have gotten a clue by then that I have a problem. If you have not created a image of your OS; Computer Hope has the best malware fighters there are, and they are waiting to help you.
This is more of a information topic; not a help me question. Please move to the appropriate forum if needed.
I posted this because it is so simple to do. I have so many friends that get so badly infected they can't do any thing. They don't have the knowledge to register on a forum like this. I try my best to save all their data, but some times a reformat is the best solution. I teach them to get a external USB and make back up images regularly. If they don't want to do that, I tell them to call someone else next time.
garybear!!
PS I'm sure I could have searched this topic and found a similar post. Hoping new member will click on this and make a back up image of their OS 

Hi! I don't want to be pushy or appear like a know it all; If I could just get every PC user to make a back up image of their OS, I would die happy. It's so simple to do and can save you many hours of aggravation. I know this will appear like I'm bumping up my thread, but this is so important to me. If just one member or one visitor reads this thread and creates a back up image of their OS it will make my day. I know all you computers geeks know what I saying but this is for all those that have never taken the time to make a back up image of their OS. I don't want all you guru's to jump on this and thread and agree with me. It's just important to me to post this. I hope you understand. I will mark this thread solved and get off my stump.
Thank You!!
garybear! 

I have never backed up my OS drive. The only thing I ever back-up is stuff I create. Applications I bought I can download from the vendor page and reinstall, or reinstall from their discs. Applications I downloaded I can download and install again; tweaks I made to the system can be done again. There is a time investment but for me I'd rather use my backup storage space for backing up data that is, quite literally, irreplacable; No matter how hard I search on the internet I am not going to find copies of the current source to any of my applications.

In fact I keep most of my data off the system partition, so I can reinstall windows without losing too much work. (and that which I do lose, from the documents folder, is backed up every single night at 3:00AM to an external, so I merely extract that backup and I'd have a copy of my data that is less than a day old.

I've always felt backing up or imaging the OS drive to be redundant. Why commit backup storage to data that you could just as easily replace by using your Windows Disc, and your various program discs, or by downloading the applications from the internet. I'll admit it generally takes a few days after reinstalling windows to get things in order again, but it takes longer than that to replace data you made yourself since you need to re-create it from scratch.

I have never backed up my OS drive.

I've always felt backing up or imaging the OS drive to be redundant.

+1, its pointless.

+1, its pointless.

I think many experienced users will disagree with you.  Why spend many hours getting your system back to the way you had it before an unfortunate situation required reinstalling your OS and software when you could quickly restore it from a full backup of your OS partition?  The point about this practice consuming space on an external hard drive is not very significant, given the size of hard drives nowadays.  You don't need to keep many copies of a full hard drive image, but keeping more than 1 could be an extra precaution.

This discussion should also include hard drive partitioning.  By keeping your user-created files on a non-OS partition, you can minimize the size of the hard drive image for your OS partition.   

Hello!! I agree with soybean 100%. I'm very happy to see these reply's to my topic. W7 will back up my OS when ever I schedule it. I have it scheduled to back up my OS once a month. Each time W7 makes a back up, it replaces the old back up, unless I move the old one to another folder.
This way it only uses about 20GB on a TB external HD. That's not very much these days. I can be back up and running exactly like the day I created that image in about 20 minutes. Why would you want to restore from a restore disk and spend several days restoring, when you can restore every thing just like it was in 20 minutes. Plus you spend another 6 hours updating windows. That's not any thing I enjoy.
If you really want to restore back to out of the box, W7 also has a feature that you can do that do that, and you don't have to find a restore disk. I have done both ways, but prefer restoring my OS with the back up feature and not starting over from day 1.
I do think a fresh install of your OS would be good once in a blue moon, just to have the feeling of a PC that is totally cleaned up.
That's my 2 cents! Thank you for all the reply's

From my experience the Windows image backup and restore is very slow compared to other 3rd party solutions.

"From my experience the Windows image backup and restore is very slow compared to other 3rd party solutions."
But it's free. I'm old and slow also

I think many experienced users will disagree with you.  Why spend many hours getting your system back to the way you had it before an unfortunate situation required reinstalling your OS and software when you could quickly restore it from a full backup of your OS partition?  The point about this practice consuming space on an external hard drive is not very significant, given the size of hard drives nowadays.  You don't need to keep many copies of a full hard drive image, but keeping more than 1 could be an extra precaution.

This discussion should also include hard drive partitioning.  By keeping your user-created files on a non-OS partition, you can minimize the size of the hard drive image for your OS partition.

I'm with Soybean on this issue.  I have found image backups to be very valuable as opposed to reinstalling Windows, installing all the applications & performing all the updates.  I store images from all my machines on a 1TB USB drive.  All data is on a separate partition on the primary computer which does not get imaged but does get backed up to various devices, including a NAS drive.

From my experience the Windows image backup and restore is very slow compared to other 3rd party solutions.

I have two freeware programs that create backup images of my OS. Macrium Reflect and Paragon. I don't see that much time difference with them or W7 backup feature. They all take around 15 to 20 minutes. I'm para-node and I use all three. All three work very well and have never let me down. If they do, then I'll just restore to back out of the box.
PS I like FREE!

Why spend many hours getting your system back to the way you had it before an unfortunate situation required reinstalling your OS and software when you could quickly restore it from a full backup of your OS partition?

If nothing else, an excuse to do a clean install. restoring from a back-up will restore any cruft from application installations and uninstallations that accumulated, as well.

The point about this practice consuming space on an external hard drive is not very significant, given the size of hard drives nowadays.

Isn't it? My C: drive has 642GB of data. Even if we assume that compression will make that half-size (which is quite liberal), that is still 331GB of data. A full backup off ALL of my irreplacable data (stuff that takes weeks, months, or even years to re-create, and even if I do it won't ever be the same) is only around 400MB, compressed into a .7z file.

Even assuming I had the extra disk space to store such a disk image (which I don't, my largest external is 500GB and it's used for data storage) there is still the fact that in the space used to make a system disk image I could make over 800 complete backups of data. As it is now I have backups of that data going back to last April.

I would have to justify using up what amounts to 800 backups of my data that I literally cannot replace at all with data that is nothing more than a jumble of vendor-supplied applications and data. I have a backup of my windows installation. it's called my Windows Disc. If I didn't have a Windows disc, well, then I guess I might feel differently about it, but if somebody doesn't have a windows disc I would think that that the best way to solve that is to get one, not start wasting disk space by backing up the same data it would contain.

Only twice, in the entire time I've used computers have I been forced to reinstall due to circumstances beyond my control. In both cases, I was back up and running in a few hours. As you said, there is a time investment when your backup is basically the windows disk, but you cannot just disregard the time investment required to make the disk images. Considering both times I was forced to reinstall were from installations that were at least a year old, even a single weekly imaging of the drive that took only 10 minutes would amount to a total time investment of almost 9 hours. In which case it is merely changing where the time is invested, it's not actually saving any time at all. And it certainly isn't saving disk space. (In both cases where I was forced to reinstall I would have had to go back at least a month to avoid the problem that causes me to consider reinstallation, which means I would have had to have had at least 4 or 5 full backups if I was using a weekly schedule.

For me, I simply cannot justify the time investment or the usage of disk space. We all create documents, files, images, etc that are literally irreplacable. With Windows, and various applications, we stick a disc in or run an installer and we just have to tweak a few settings. Lose photos, documents, or other data that you worked on and re-creating it is going to take a *censored* of a lot longer than even the longest OS reinstallation, not to mention, depending on the nature of the documents, the emotional impact.

I've probably mentioned it elsewhere, but I had several applications that I had worked on over the course of nearly 5 years. I had backups of that data, but as luck would have it (or wouldn't have it, I suppose) the main drive failed shortly before the backups all died as well. I lost 5 years of work in an instant. All I had left was a bunch of .chk files found by checkdisk after the main crashed, which I aggregated to a single gigantic (100MB+) file and hand-edited to piece together two projects. (out of dozens). I'm not keen to go through that again, and the fact that I had several backups and they all died has only prompted me to add more backup layers. Every single external drive I have has at least one, if not multiple copies, of the data  I simply cannot lose. Data that is worth the time investment to backup.. In my view, the OS, and reinstallable applications, aren't, because while it only takes a few minutes to restore as opposed to a few hours to get everything reinstalled, the sum time you (or the computer) spend making those images more than makes up for it. I make backups to prevent mental anguish over time investments that dissappear in an instant, not to make things "convenient".



My case isn't exactly special, either; it could very well have been a research paper, a thesis, some independent research or something else that I created and thus couldn't be replaced with a quick reinstall. I'm not keen on losing several years worth of work, and being able to recreate my Operating System in a few minutes rather than a few hours wouldn't be much of a trade-off, so I use that space for the backups of irreplacable data.

This discussion should also include hard drive partitioning.  By keeping your user-created files on a non-OS partition, you can minimize the size of the hard drive image for your OS partition.

True. But again, I question what exactly you gain by making an OS drive image. "Convenience" is all I can come up with, and if you have the disk space to use up duplicating vendor-provided data, than maybe that convenience is worth it. However, I can count on one hand the number of times I've been forced to reinstall my Operating System due to circumstances beyond my control (in fact, I can only think of one time, when I got infected with virut) To me, the task of reinstalling an Operating System is neither difficult nor particularly cerebral, anda fresh install will clear the various things that I will have accumulated and couldn't be bothered to remove. Reinstalling drivers, applications, etc, represent a time investment but they aren't difficult; recreating my user data would represent a cerebral time investment as I basically do the same things I already did, and that is assuming I can be bothered to recreate them in the first place. I still have dozens of projects that I had, lost, and haven't even tried to re-create. Sure, backing up user data and OS data is not by any means mutually exclusive, but I'm simply not keen on backing up gigabytes of data just to save myself an hour or two when I could use that time and space to make a backup that could very well save me from losing years of work.

Hello BC_Programmer!You have over looked One very important point.
That is " Not every one is a master mind". My topic was started for those that are not that talented to write TB's of data each day

This is for people who need just a couple of clicks and 20 minutes to get them back to reading emails from their great grand kids or looking up a favorite recipe or maybe just playing a game. Maybe there is bad weather in the area and they want a weather report. I don't do that much installing and uninstalling that would require a fresh install, but I can see a need for that if that's the way you use your PC. Having said all that, I really enjoyed reading your well written and long reply. Not a lot of meat and potatoes, but if it will cause people to at least be aware there's a very easy way and have the insurance that they can restore their PC back just like it was last week ago or take the long road to recovery as you are suggesting; I have not wasted my time.
Thank you for your reply to my topic!
PS I think your reasoning is in the minority of most PC users.

I have two freeware programs that create backup images of my OS. Macrium Reflect and Paragon. I don't see that much time difference with them or W7 backup feature. They all take around 15 to 20 minutes. I'm para-node and I use all three. All three work very well and have never let me down. If they do, then I'll just restore to back out of the box.
PS I like FREE!

My experience is with retail imaging software.  ZenWorks Imaging always seemed pretty quick as well as Norton Ghost.

I use Bullguard AV on some of my systems and have found its backup options much easier to use than the Windows ones (once you know what your doing)

I also would use something like Easeus Backup over the Windows Backup - Last time I checked, also free and much more efficient.

Hi! The reason they call it PC(Personal Computer) is because we all have our own APPs we like and trust. It's natural to think yours is better. What it all comes down to is use which ever image backup program that you trust and know how it works. There are free ones and there are some you have to pay for. The paid versions usually have more bells and whistles. It's a just a matter of what works for you.
The important thing is pick one and use it unless you want to start from day 1. Some day you will be glad you have a current back up image of your OS. W7 has a nagger that keeps reminding you that you have not created a back up. That tells me that it's important. Well lets say some one at Microsoft thinks it's important. It's your decision to make. Those that don't think it's important are very few in these times. External storage drives are cheep. I have seen 3TB. How the average person would ever fill one of them up is beyond my imagination.
I want to thank everyone that has posted on this topic. I hope a guest or a member has been convinced to make back up images on a regular bases. I will leave it open for awhile and Then I will mark it solved.
Thanks!!

That is " Not every one is a master mind". My topic was started for those that are not that talented to write TB's of data each day

You don't have to write it. Consider photos. Many people will plug their camera in, and the transfer wizard will copy them to the local disk, and delete them from the camera. Depending on how an image is made, restoring an image could easily wipe those files, which would be impossible to recover; or, again, depending on their storage location, they could not even be part of the image, meaning they aren't "backed up" at all. (which raises the point that disk imaging is not a replacement for backups anyway).

This is for people who need just a couple of clicks and 20 minutes to get them back to reading emails from their great grand kids or looking up a favorite recipe or maybe just playing a game.

And what about the photos of those grandkids? Most Camera software defaults to the user profile folder, which upon restoring a disk image will be paved over with whatever is in the image, destroying anything that was there. (the default for the camera wizard also deletes the photos from the camera, making the copy on the hard drive the only one)

I don't do that much installing and uninstalling that would require a fresh install

Installing and uninstalling applications or changing various settings has a cumulative effect. Using a PNG, GIF, or JPEG background in Windows XP can introduce a whole host of problems that most people wouldn't have the first clue about, for example. Badly written installers might replace shared files, causing odd errors to show up during startup or when launching applications. "Windows Rot" is what it is commonly referred to, although it has nothing to do with windows and everything to do with the thousands of otherwise unassuming changes various applications might make as they are used, installed, and configured. Death by a thousand cuts. The time it takes the Right-Click menu to show for most items is a good indicator of how bad it is. It should be pretty much instant. For me it can sometimes take a second; on some of my older PCs before reformatting I've had it take minutes or literally han fact install hooks and libraries in that fashion, and may or may not properly remove them when the application is uninstalled (and using a tool like CCleaner could in fact make things worse). This is particularly the case since most pre-fabricated machines already come in pretty bad shape, with about a thousand useless applications installed. (My laptop was practically garbage when I bought it until I did a clean install, for example)

PS I think your reasoning is in the minority of most PC users.

The "minority" of PC users is the people that don't have irreplacable data that they created. Not the other way around. It doesn't have to be Program source code, obviously. Most people have various Documents, slideshows, presentations, Photos, or even game high-scores that represent a significant time investment which would need to be duplicated of those files were lost. In the case of photos, particularly, you simply cannot re-take them; if you lose the only copy of a digital photograph, it's gone. If the disk image in fact stores those as well, than what happens if they change or revise a document, presentation, or other file in the meantime? when the image is restored it will mercilessly pave over everything on the drive with whatever the image has. This can be mitigated by partitioning, but knowing how to partition is again outside the so-called "majority" of users that merely use it for E-mail and basic browsing. In fact, people using their systems for E-mail and basic browsing are at the lowest risk of developing a problem that restoring a disk image could fix that could be fixed via other means, primarily System Restore, which is designed for the very purposes you cite for Disk Imaging (Which is the only way you can back-up an OS)

W7 has a nagger that keeps reminding you that you have not created a back up.

It's talking about backing up your data. Not Operating System Files. You can't restore those properly using anything but a disk image, which of course images the entire disk/partition, not just the OS.
Disk Imaging is not a total backup solution. If somebody has the ability to backup and restore disk images they are already outside the alleged Majority of users anyway. If somebody doesn't have any personal data on their machines, if their system is basically only the OS and preferences, than yes, a OS Disk image might see usage... But where are they going to put it? Additionally, if they only use their system for E-mail and checking the weather, how will they get in a situation where they need to restore a Disk Image, as opposed to being able to resolve the problem with System Restore?

Which brings me to my point- for the set of users you are prescribing this for, what does Imaging their drives get them that System Restore doesn't provide, aside from additional complications and an ironically higher chance of data loss as restoring the image means paving over anything in the "My Documents" folder which is the default location for all applications to save data to. I can already see a likely scenario, somebody following a strict backup regimen that images their C drive to an external automatically, or something; one day, they realize they need to  see their tax files from last year, or have to refer to some other document they saved. The document isn't there, though, because a month or two ago they restored a month old-backup image in an attempt to fix  the weird lines they had on their monitor sometimes when they played bejeweled. Of course that didn't fix the problem because those "weird lines" are in fact a fault with the video driver, but restoring the image wiped over every single user-document that was newer than 3 months. As far as they can tell, files simply dissappear randomly. This only prompts them to back up more often, but doesn't address the fact that what they are doing is not backing up their own user data but rather backing up their system drive so they can get up and running quickly, in the event that their OS is corrupted or something.

My Point isn't so much that imaging the system drive is completely useless, but rather that it should be regarded as less important than backing up your own data. Those Photos that were sent in E-mail attachments of their grandkids, or that scan of that picture they drew in kindergarten or that camcorder video of their graduation, etc. Those are not valueless and you are basically defaulting on "user data isn't important" which is more likely to cause people to lose valuable data. Those photos, image scans, videos, etc are what should be backed up. Not the Operating System. Any Prefabricated machine comes with a Recovery Disk that performs that same purpose.

My Point isn't so much that imaging the system drive is completely useless, but rather that it should be regarded as less important than backing up your own data.

Worth repeating. Collect your photos and videos and burn them to DVD.

[Moderator]

The horse isn't breathing. He's on his back. His legs are up in the air.

The horse isn't breathing. He's on his back. His legs are up in the air.

Shoot him!

Hi friends!! I'm not going to even try to get in a intellectual argument, because I would lose badly.I only finished one year of college and then I joined the Air Force 1957-1962. When you use any kind of method to back up data,there is always a chance it won't get copied exactly. Both Macrium Reflect and Paragon have a feature that allows you to mount the image as a virtual drive and actually see what's on the image. The only thing that stays on my C drive is the OS and a few Apps that I use every day. Any data that is important goes on a external drive or DVD. I seldom use the backed up image, but it makes me feel secure knowing I surely have one that will restore my PC just like it was the day I made the image; with 95 Windows up dates(patches), that would take hours to down load.
My life is not surrounded by  people that were born with a PC in their lap, so showing them how they can restore their PC just like it was the day it quit working the way they want it is some thing I feel good about.
Yes it's highly possible they can use a restore point and get the same results, providing their PC will boot.
Sense this topic seems to have turned into who can write three pages, I will go a little off topic.(Sorry)!!!
I'm 73 years young and I live in a retirement center. I say young because I'm young compared to most residents that live here. Most are in their 80's I have formed a computer club and we meet once a month.
I started learning about computers about 8 years ago when I was diagnosed with colon cancer, which killed my father in his 40's.
I'm self taught and almost all I know has came from great forums like Computer Hope.
After removing half my colon and 6 months of chemo, I'm not much good for any thing but hanging out on this PC.
I'm alive and as Allan knows, I'm a fighter(That's our secret and will remain between us).
No one will ever change my mind about having a back up image setting on a USB;and waiting for some kind of disaster to happen, and knowing I can recover in 20 minutes.
The horse is dead. Someone shot him, so I doubt if I will reply further on this topic. I think we gave it a great ride and I really want to thank everyone that replied on this topic. Now I'm going to make a back up image of my OS. It's that time again  .
Thanks again my friends at CH.