Creating a system image?

Quoting a MS web site, "A system image is an exact copy of a drive. By
default, a system image includes the drives required for Windows to run.
It also includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files."

This is puzzling. Wouldn't a system image require a huge amount of DVD
disks? When I bought my PC about 5 years ago, I thought I recall
creating a few DVD disks in setting put the PC. (I can't find them at
the moment.) These two ideas seem to conflict with one another. I must
be missing something. What's up?

On 03/22/2015 06:53 PM, W. eWatson wrote:
Quoting a MS web site, "A system image is an exact copy of a drive. By
default, a system image includes the drives required for Windows to run.
It also includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files."

This is puzzling. Wouldn't a system image require a huge amount of DVD
disks? When I bought my PC about 5 years ago, I thought I recall
creating a few DVD disks in setting put the PC. (I can't find them at
the moment.) These two ideas seem to conflict with one another. I must
be missing something. What's up?



Correct. A complete system image would require a lot of DVD's and waste
a lot of time.

Since hard drives are cheap the best thing to do is simply clone the
entire drive to another one...and skip the "system image" option

In article , says...

Quoting a MS web site, "A system image is an exact copy of a drive. By
default, a system image includes the drives required for Windows to run.
It also includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files."

This is puzzling. Wouldn't a system image require a huge amount of DVD
disks? When I bought my PC about 5 years ago, I thought I recall
creating a few DVD disks in setting put the PC. (I can't find them at
the moment.) These two ideas seem to conflict with one another. I must
be missing something. What's up?

Yes, creating a system image on dvd's, even dual layer, might take a few
especially after some apps were installed. Thing is most people use an
external hard disk or a second (or third) internal hard disk to save the
image to nowadays.

On 3/22/2015 4:53 PM, W. eWatson wrote:
Quoting a MS web site, "A system image is an exact copy of a drive. By
default, a system image includes the drives required for Windows to run.
It also includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files."

This is puzzling. Wouldn't a system image require a huge amount of DVD
disks? When I bought my PC about 5 years ago, I thought I recall
creating a few DVD disks in setting put the PC. (I can't find them at
the moment.) These two ideas seem to conflict with one another. I must
be missing something. What's up?

I have no idea how MS system image works, but for other imaging programs,
they only image the parts of the disks actually in use, then compress that.

Biggest problem with imaging is that people often buy the biggest disk
they can afford and have only one windows partition...plus the other sfuff
that MS sets up.

So, you image every music file and movie and everything else that doesn't
need to be imaged. Most people don't have anywhere to put that image.
And it takes forever if they do.

Backups only work if you actually do them.

My solution to the problem for win7 is to set one 25GB C: drive and put
the rest on additional partitions.
C: contains only the stuff that can't be just copied...like anything
MS or anything requiring phone-home activation.
Everything else gets installed on D:, along with all the media files
and backups and databases and and...
I can archive my C: partition on two DVDs.

Image C: to a file on D: frequently.
Copy the image to offline storage in case your drive dies, along with
any program files, media files you need to protect from D:.
My current favorite is free macrium reflect.

Another thing that can help...
Image your C: partition.
Sysprep the drive.
Image the sysprepped C: partition.
(and the hidden windows partition)
Restore the Pre-sysprep partition, cuz there's only a few times
it will let you do that.
If your system fails completely, the sysprepped image can be
restored to a new system...assuming you have the license keys to
reactivate it.

I do this at least once a year. It has saved my bacon.

An image of XP with software installed can usually
fit onto a CD. An image of Win7 with software
installed can usually fit on 2 DVDs. But that's before
you start filling it up with photos, docs, drivers,
runtimes, etc. Win7 bloats at an impressive rate.
It can grow to 40-60 GB with little effort.

The best approach is to set up the system and
get it all configured, then make an image that can
be put back if necessary. Back up data separately.
If you make an image of a 3-year-old install you just
have a giant image with 3 years of bloat, that may or
may not be in good shape.

In article , says...

On 3/22/2015 4:53 PM, W. eWatson wrote:
Quoting a MS web site, "A system image is an exact copy of a drive. By
default, a system image includes the drives required for Windows to run.
It also includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files."

This is puzzling. Wouldn't a system image require a huge amount of DVD
disks? When I bought my PC about 5 years ago, I thought I recall
creating a few DVD disks in setting put the PC. (I can't find them at
the moment.) These two ideas seem to conflict with one another. I must
be missing something. What's up?

I have no idea how MS system image works, but for other imaging programs,
they only image the parts of the disks actually in use, then compress that.

Biggest problem with imaging is that people often buy the biggest disk
they can afford and have only one windows partition...plus the other sfuff
that MS sets up.

So, you image every music file and movie and everything else that doesn't
need to be imaged. Most people don't have anywhere to put that image.
And it takes forever if they do.

Backups only work if you actually do them.

My solution to the problem for win7 is to set one 25GB C: drive and put
the rest on additional partitions.
C: contains only the stuff that can't be just copied...like anything
MS or anything requiring phone-home activation.
Everything else gets installed on D:, along with all the media files
and backups and databases and and...
I can archive my C: partition on two DVDs.

Image C: to a file on D: frequently.
Copy the image to offline storage in case your drive dies, along with
any program files, media files you need to protect from D:.
My current favorite is free macrium reflect.

EXCEPT usually when the drive goes no partition is accessible. Better to
use separate hard drives instead of partitioning the one.


Another thing that can help...
Image your C: partition.
Sysprep the drive.
Image the sysprepped C: partition.
(and the hidden windows partition)
Restore the Pre-sysprep partition, cuz there's only a few times
it will let you do that.
If your system fails completely, the sysprepped image can be
restored to a new system...assuming you have the license keys to
reactivate it.

I do this at least once a year. It has saved my bacon.

On Sun, 22 Mar 2015 21:13:40 -0300 "pjp"
wrote in article




Yes, creating a system image on dvd's, even dual layer, might take a few
especially after some apps were installed. Thing is most people use an
external hard disk or a second (or third) internal hard disk to save the
image to nowadays.

I endorse that. I have two 1 TB drives with five partitions and a third
internal 2 TB drive that I use for a daily incremental backup. It creates
a full one after five incrementals. I copy the daily backup to an
external drive. I know that I should have an "off site" backup to be
safe, but unless my house burns down I feel pretty safe with the
duplicated backups.

W. eWatson wrote:
Quoting a MS web site, "A system image is an exact copy of a drive. By
default, a system image includes the drives required for Windows to run.
It also includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files."

This is puzzling. Wouldn't a system image require a huge amount of DVD
disks? When I bought my PC about 5 years ago, I thought I recall
creating a few DVD disks in setting put the PC. (I can't find them at
the moment.) These two ideas seem to conflict with one another. I must
be missing something. What's up?

The Windows Backup software, at a minimum, backs up C:.
It won't allow you to not do that. So the output will
be huge, no matter where it's stored.

When I was experimenting with Windows Backup to DVD,
it took four DVDs minimum, just so I could so some tests
on a much smaller partition. The whole process took about
two hours. You'd have to have rocks in your head, to
do that on a regular basis.

In some version of that software, there is a bug where
you need to stop what you're doing, "format" the media,
then go back and tell the backup software to try again.
And then it will pick up your formatted media. And that's
why the process is "attended" and you have to stick around
to fiddle with the media. For each of those DVDs, I had
to use some other tool to prepare the DVD for usage.

Now, to top it all off, the format of the information on
the DVD, is not the same as the format used on external
hard drives. If you back up to a hard drive, there is
one .VHD file per disk partition. And VHD, there are
a number of tools to manipulate it (it can be mounted for
browsing, it can be accessed in a Virtual Machine). The
format is known, and there is a spec. Even tools like 7-ZIP
are worth a shot, if you need to browse.

The DVD, on the other hand, I was not able to find any
other tool to read it. I couldn't browse the contents.
It's not a VHD, I know that much. My available tools
couldn't identify the format. And if you ever had trouble
with one of those DVDs, then you'd have a "tool shortage"
to deal with it.

After my experiment, I can heartily recommend using
an external hard drive as a target. The DVD as a choice
of backup media, is a "world of hurt". Maybe a BluRay would
make such a process reasonable (for a tiny C: partition), but
other than that, I'm not planning on doing any more
experiments with the DVD option. Ugh.

Paul

In article , , W.
eWatson says...

Quoting a MS web site, "A system image is an exact copy of a drive. By
default, a system image includes the drives required for Windows to run.
It also includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files."

This is puzzling. Wouldn't a system image require a huge amount of DVD
disks? When I bought my PC about 5 years ago, I thought I recall
creating a few DVD disks in setting put the PC. (I can't find them at
the moment.) These two ideas seem to conflict with one another. I must
be missing something. What's up?

If the disk is largely empty - or say 50% full / 50% empty - the imaging
algorithm says (A x 0 bytes of nothing), and stores that; just that.
Rather than all the 'zeroes'.
Hope that makes sense.

Additionally, the data itself is compressed. So that's even more space
saved in the written image.

--
Duncan.

On 3/22/2015 5:13 PM, pjp wrote:
In article , says...

Quoting a MS web site, "A system image is an exact copy of a drive. By
default, a system image includes the drives required for Windows to run.
It also includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files."

This is puzzling. Wouldn't a system image require a huge amount of DVD
disks? When I bought my PC about 5 years ago, I thought I recall
creating a few DVD disks in setting put the PC. (I can't find them at
the moment.) These two ideas seem to conflict with one another. I must
be missing something. What's up?

Yes, creating a system image on dvd's, even dual layer, might take a few
especially after some apps were installed. Thing is most people use an
external hard disk or a second (or third) internal hard disk to save the
image to nowadays.


How do I transfer all of my C-drive to a WD 1TB HD that I have?

In article , says...

On 3/22/2015 5:13 PM, pjp wrote:
In article , says...

Quoting a MS web site, "A system image is an exact copy of a drive. By
default, a system image includes the drives required for Windows to run.
It also includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files."

This is puzzling. Wouldn't a system image require a huge amount of DVD
disks? When I bought my PC about 5 years ago, I thought I recall
creating a few DVD disks in setting put the PC. (I can't find them at
the moment.) These two ideas seem to conflict with one another. I must
be missing something. What's up?

Yes, creating a system image on dvd's, even dual layer, might take a few
especially after some apps were installed. Thing is most people use an
external hard disk or a second (or third) internal hard disk to save the
image to nowadays.


How do I transfer all of my C-drive to a WD 1TB HD that I have?

Clone it if there's nothing on the WD you want to keep. You can then
replace the existing drive with the WD and it should boot with change to
disk size available.

On 3/22/2015 4:53 PM, W. eWatson wrote:
Quoting a MS web site, "A system image is an exact copy of a drive. By
default, a system image includes the drives required for Windows to run.
It also includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files."

This is puzzling. Wouldn't a system image require a huge amount of DVD
disks? When I bought my PC about 5 years ago, I thought I recall
creating a few DVD disks in setting put the PC. (I can't find them at
the moment.) These two ideas seem to conflict with one another. I must
be missing something. What's up?


My PC has two internal hard drives, each divided into two partitions.
Each drive has some unallocated space in case I need to expand any of
the partitions.

One drive is a 100 GB solid-state drive (SSD) with two partitions: C and
J. C contains Windows 7 and only those applications that will not run
unless they too are on C; 47.5GB is actually used. J contains all the
other applications; 30GB is actually used. With some compression, a
full backup of C requires 15.7GB; and a full backup of J requires 14.4GB.

The other hard drive is a 1TB "spinner". It too has two partitions: D
and F. F is a recovery partition (whatever that means); 100MB is
actually used. D contains my data; 156.6GB is actually used. I never
backup F since I would instead restore my system from the backups of C
and J. With some compression, a full backup of D excluding photos
requires 14.8GB; and a full backup of only my photos requires 10.5GB.

Note that the same compression yields much more reduction in backup
sizes for D than for C or J. That is because much of D consists of
documents with significant compressible white space while much of C and
J consists of binary execuables with little compressible content.

When I do backups, the files are written to my D partition, primarily
because I have so much unused space there. I then encrypt the backups
and move the encrypted files to an external 500GB hard drive, which I
keep remotely from my PC. I keep the unencrypted backups on my D
partition in case I foul up a file and need to restore it.


Each week, I do a full backup on one of the C, D (no photos), or J
partitions and incremental backups of the other two. The following
week, it's a full backup of a different partition and incremental
backups of the others. This results in a three-week cycle of backups.
For each partition, I keep two full backups their related incremental
backups, deleting the older full and its two increments when I do a new
full backup.

Outside of this cyclic process, I backup photos (full and then 2-3
increments) when I have added more than 3-4 photos. Also outside of
this cycle, I backup my archived software installation files (full and
then two increments) when I have 5-6 new files; the archive is on a
flash drive, which I backup directly to the external hard drive.
Neither the photo nor installer backups are encrypted when copied to the
external hard drive.

--
David E. Ross

Why do we tolerate political leaders who
spend more time belittling hungry children
than they do trying to fix the problem of
hunger? http://mazon.org/

W. eWatson wrote:
Quoting a MS web site, "A system image is an exact copy of a drive. By
default, a system image includes the drives required for Windows to run.
It also includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files."

This is puzzling. Wouldn't a system image require a huge amount of DVD
disks? When I bought my PC about 5 years ago, I thought I recall
creating a few DVD disks in setting put the PC. (I can't find them at
the moment.) These two ideas seem to conflict with one another. I must
be missing something. What's up?

If you want the equivalent of System Image, the free version
of the "5 stream" of Macrium Reflect Free is available.

The information page has been removed from the macrium.com site,
but the CNET page is still available. Macrium has released the
"6 stream", so is no longer working on version 5. And version 5
is perfectly adequate for imaging purposes.

http://download.cnet.com/Macrium-Ref...-10845728.html

That gives you a file called ReflectDL.exe.

OK, the file is signed, so CNET didn't add something to it.
Macrium doesn't put toolbars in these.

https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/5...a4c8/analysis/

So if you need a free imaging tool, that'll do.
And it provides a WAIK-based boot disk for disaster
recovery if your hard drive dies. As long as your
image is stored on the external drive. When you run
the 3,537,360 byte file, remember to adjust the settings
so you get the whole thing. "Reflect Installer and PE Components".

http://i58.tinypic.com/9lbqty.gif

When you eventually get that 3.5MB stub set up and
get it downloading stuff, expect 100MB + 50MB files
to show up. The 50MB one is the backup software, and
the 100MB one is a WAIK kit for making a boot CD.
During installation, the installer stores those to
support the option to make boot media.

Paul

"pjp" wrote in message
...
In article , says...

Quoting a MS web site, "A system image is an exact copy of a drive. By
default, a system image includes the drives required for Windows to run.
It also includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files."

This is puzzling. Wouldn't a system image require a huge amount of DVD
disks? When I bought my PC about 5 years ago, I thought I recall
creating a few DVD disks in setting put the PC. (I can't find them at
the moment.) These two ideas seem to conflict with one another. I must
be missing something. What's up?

Yes, creating a system image on dvd's, even dual layer, might take a few
especially after some apps were installed. Thing is most people use an
external hard disk or a second (or third) internal hard disk to save the
image to nowadays.

I have two external 1 TB drives--a backup and a backup for the backup.

On 3/22/2015 8:03 PM, pjp wrote:
In article , says...

On 3/22/2015 5:13 PM, pjp wrote:
In article , says...

Quoting a MS web site, "A system image is an exact copy of a drive. By
default, a system image includes the drives required for Windows to run.
It also includes Windows and your system settings, programs, and files."

This is puzzling. Wouldn't a system image require a huge amount of DVD
disks? When I bought my PC about 5 years ago, I thought I recall
creating a few DVD disks in setting put the PC. (I can't find them at
the moment.) These two ideas seem to conflict with one another. I must
be missing something. What's up?

Yes, creating a system image on dvd's, even dual layer, might take a few
especially after some apps were installed. Thing is most people use an
external hard disk or a second (or third) internal hard disk to save the
image to nowadays.


How do I transfer all of my C-drive to a WD 1TB HD that I have?

Clone it if there's nothing on the WD you want to keep. You can then
replace the existing drive with the WD and it should boot with change to
disk size available.

Is there a favorite clone program?