Windows 8.1 System Image creation - X-Post

I haven't yet tested it, but can anyone tell me from experience if an
image of the system drive produced by Windows 8.1 is the same physical
size as the drive being imaged?

I have read that you can't restore to a smaller partition, but can restore
to a larger partition then resize.
However nothing seems to mention if empty/free blocks are copied over to
the image so is an image of a 500GB drive only 5% used the full 500GB in
size?

If so, is the strategy to reduce the size of the system (C drive to the
minimum possible and put data on another (D:?) drive?

I thought these days everything just came with a huge C: drive.

I could, of course, use a 3rd party imaging tool but I'm still exploring
the built in Windows options.

Cheers

Dave R
--
Windows 8.1 on PCSpecialist box

On 17/06/2014 13:02, David wrote:
I haven't yet tested it, but can anyone tell me from experience if an
image of the system drive produced by Windows 8.1 is the same physical
size as the drive being imaged?

I have read that you can't restore to a smaller partition, but can restore
to a larger partition then resize.
However nothing seems to mention if empty/free blocks are copied over to
the image so is an image of a 500GB drive only 5% used the full 500GB in
size?

If so, is the strategy to reduce the size of the system (C drive to the
minimum possible and put data on another (D:?) drive?

I thought these days everything just came with a huge C: drive.

I could, of course, use a 3rd party imaging tool but I'm still exploring
the built in Windows options.

Cheers

Dave R


It doesn't save empty space to the image.

Paragon do a free partition manager that works.

You can shrink the C: drive in windows but you really need to defrag the
free space first so the data is all at the start of the partition as
shrinking doesn't move anything.

David wrote:
I haven't yet tested it, but can anyone tell me from experience if an
image of the system drive produced by Windows 8.1 is the same physical
size as the drive being imaged?

I have read that you can't restore to a smaller partition, but can restore
to a larger partition then resize.
However nothing seems to mention if empty/free blocks are copied over to
the image so is an image of a 500GB drive only 5% used the full 500GB in
size?

If so, is the strategy to reduce the size of the system (C drive to the
minimum possible and put data on another (D:?) drive?

I thought these days everything just came with a huge C: drive.

I could, of course, use a 3rd party imaging tool but I'm still exploring
the built in Windows options.

Cheers

Dave R

Imaging applications, for the most part, use VSS and intelligent
sector copy. The imaging application takes note of every sector
needed to reproduce the files and file system, and only records
those. The "unused" clusters are not recorded. When the image is
restored later, again, only the intelligent sectors get copied back.
Portions of the hard drive where unused clusters would be located,
are not initialized. So if you have a 500GB disk with 20GB of files,
the image is 20GB, and on restoration, only 20GB of write operations
are performed to the new bare disk. That means if you restore to a
new 500GB disk, 480GB of it is not touched by a write command.
Only later, as the disk is used, will those other clusters be used.

Windows 7 and Windows 8 have a System Image function. It comes
with a GUI. As far as I know, it *insists* that C: be backed
up. Because it is a "System Image", and the reason Microsoft is
providing it, is so that the OS files can be protected in a
useful way. It allows users to restore to "bare metal" new hard
drive, putting back their OS, so that on a reboot, the OS will
come back up. Windows has different backup features for individual
files, but I doubt that would be very good for reproducing the
entire C: drive.

The GUI System Image function, is similar to the Microsoft script
tool called "wbadmin". And the commands fed to "wbadmin" do
similar things to the System Image function. So this affords
a way of accessing that function, without the GUI. This comes
in handy, on OEM computers where the OEM company broke the
System Image panel. And it no longer works.

The Windows-provided function does not "resize on restore".
You cannot capture C: from a 1TB drive (assuming C: takes up
the whole thing), there are only 20GB of actual files, then
ask it to restore to a 500GB drive. There are two ways
to solve that problem. "Shrink" the C: partition on the
original 1TB drive, until it is 500GB or less, then do
the System Image. Now, the fixed size of C: inside the
image, will fit on the new blank 500GB drive. The second
way, is use a commercial backup utility.

Macrium Reflect Free can resize from a captured .mrimg,
and restore to a smaller drive. Macrium Reflect Free works
similar to the Windows System Image, in that VSS and intelligent
sector copy are used. The difference is, Macrium has a
limited resize capability on restore. If the right-most
partition is a "pig", it can be automatically resized for
you. If a middle partition is the "pig", Macrium won't
touch that one. So as long as the right-most partition
is the one needing resizing, the "resize on restore" works.
This design is necessary, so that no "interface" need
be designed for it to work. It simplifies the design.
Some day that could be fixed, but at the expense of
presenting yet another GUI for users to understand and
use. The current implementation, the one I've seen and
used, is sufficient for a limited set of scenarios.
There are undoubtedly other commercial backup utilities
(may of which use the exact same VSS and intelligent
copy scheme), which have controls for resizing. But
I haven't tested them. I have a $0 budget for backup
software :-)

*******

When you back up, remember the disk has an MBR and a
"first track" area. These can contain boot information
for various OSes. When you make a backup, the MBR,
the first track, and things like up to four primary
partitions could be backed up. When you see a tool
with five tick boxes, one appears to be for the
entire disk, the other four might be for the primary
partitions you had created. It's possible the "main"
tick box, causes the MBR and first track to be recorded.

I expect, any backup tool worth its salt, will be recording
that small area at the front of the disk. If a disk won't
boot after restoration, it could be that the MBR and
first track did not get restored properly. (On Macrium,
it actually prompts during restore, to ask whether
you want the MBR to be restored or not.) The partition
tables had better match, for least hair loss - we're
trusting the backup tool to not do anything illogical
with such a restoration. To avoid this issue,
I generally try to maintain consistency between
a set of backups, and my partition table. If I
modify my partition table, I consider my
pool of associated backups to be null and void
and I delete them. And so far, I've not run into
a situation where my MBR operations had any side
effects of note. I haven't forced the tool to
make decisions by presenting a "dilemma" for it.

*******

The Windows System Image function, creates a .vhd file
per partition. Implying the MBR and first track, must be
stored somewhere in the backup folder. But I don't know
which file contains that info.

Many backup tools support "mounting" of the images
created - for example, in Macrium, it will open an
Explorer window showing a copy of the freshly made .mrimg
backup of C: you just finished. So you can actually
navigate down there, and extract a single file by
copy and paste.

The System Image function provided by Windows can
do the same thing. On Windows 8, you can mount a
..vhd from Disk Management, and get a single file
off a .vhd that way. Older OSes have options such as
"vhdmount.exe" for that purpose. On Windows 8, it's
a built-in. So even though it feels like you're making
system images, you also get the benefits of file by
file backup, if you can stand to copy and paste out
of a mounted image.

There is only one part of Windows System Image function
which bothers me, and that is the creation of backups
on a set of blank DVDs. Depending on the OS, that has
some flaky behavior, where you have to find a tutorial
that explains how to get the backup to finish. But the
bad part, is the format on the DVD, is *only* readable
by the Windows restoration software. No other tools
knows how to read it. I downloaded the standard from
Microsoft, and the file format is supposed to have
"five header chunks" at the front. What is written
to the DVD, is not described or does not match what
is in that document. Most users would not care about
the custom nature of the DVDs created, but I do - I
may need to do random access on that DVD some day,
and pull out a single file, and that is not possible.
If you backup to hard drives with Windows System Image,
then multiple tools will work with the .vhd files
for you, and it's not nearly as much of a disaster
in the making.

Paul

On Tue, 17 Jun 2014 12:02:47 +0000, David wrote:

I haven't yet tested it, but can anyone tell me from experience if an
image of the system drive produced by Windows 8.1 is the same physical
size as the drive being imaged?

I have read that you can't restore to a smaller partition, but can
restore to a larger partition then resize.
However nothing seems to mention if empty/free blocks are copied over to
the image so is an image of a 500GB drive only 5% used the full 500GB in
size?

If so, is the strategy to reduce the size of the system (C drive to
the minimum possible and put data on another (D:?) drive?

I thought these days everything just came with a huge C: drive.

I could, of course, use a 3rd party imaging tool but I'm still exploring
the built in Windows options.


Tried to create a system image on a network drive and it failed.

This reminded me of why I installed Paragon on my W7 box which couldn't
back itself up to a local drive using the built in Windows tools.

Paragon looks a likely option for all systems, now.

Cheers

Dave R

On 6/19/2014 10:50 AM, David.WE.Roberts wrote:
On Tue, 17 Jun 2014 12:02:47 +0000, David wrote:

I haven't yet tested it, but can anyone tell me from experience if an
image of the system drive produced by Windows 8.1 is the same physical
size as the drive being imaged?

I have read that you can't restore to a smaller partition, but can
restore to a larger partition then resize.
However nothing seems to mention if empty/free blocks are copied over to
the image so is an image of a 500GB drive only 5% used the full 500GB in
size?

If so, is the strategy to reduce the size of the system (C drive to
the minimum possible and put data on another (D:?) drive?

I thought these days everything just came with a huge C: drive.

I could, of course, use a 3rd party imaging tool but I'm still exploring
the built in Windows options.


Tried to create a system image on a network drive and it failed.

This reminded me of why I installed Paragon on my W7 box which couldn't
back itself up to a local drive using the built in Windows tools.

Paragon looks a likely option for all systems, now.

Cheers

Dave R

By default, an image is just that!
(Don't Know, Don't Care, copy the entire drive contents.)
The more complex the operation is, the more chance that an error might
occur, more time is required, and the complexity of the coping program
increases exponentially.