Backup your computer by making an image of your hard drive

Posted on December 3, 2007 at 3:06 pm

Make sure to read other posts from the Backup Data series!

Creating a good backup of your computer system involves not only backing up all of your data, but also backing up Windows and all system files when they are in a working and stable state. When a hard drive crashes or the Windows operating system becomes corrupt, it would be preferable to not only be able to load back your data quickly, but also to load back the entire operating system with all of your user settings, bookmarks, installed drivers, installed applications, and more.

A good way to have both things taken care of at once is to create an image of your hard drive. By creating an image, your entire system state, including the OS and data files, are captured like a snapshot and can be reloaded at any time. It’s the best way to protect your data and also the easiest, since you don’t have to manually copy data from various locations on the system.

DriveImage XML is a completely free data recovery program that you can use to create images and backups of logical drives and Windows partitions. Here are a couple of the major features of this program:

Quickly backup logical drives and Windows partitions to image files without having to restart Windows (you can remain logged in)
Easily browse, view or extract files from the images
Restore the images to the same drive or to a different drive
Copy data directly from drive to drive
Schedule automatic backups and image creations with Task Scheduler

The nice thing about DriveImage XML is that it uses Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Service (VSS), which means you can create hot images of hard drives that are in use. It supports Windows XP, Windows Media Center, and Windows Server 2003. Another good feature is that the images are stored in XML files, which means you can process them in 3rd party tools, not just DriveImage XML.

Create a backup image of your hard drive

Once you have it installed, go ahead and click the Backup button the the left hand side menu to get started. Choose the drives you want to backup and then click Next.

Then go ahead and choose the different options you would like for your backup. Raw mode means that the backup will be the exact size of your drive because free or empty space is backed up also. You can leave this unchecked for most purposes. Compressed means that the file will be reduced in size, but will take a longer time to create the image. You can leave everything else at the default settings.

Also, go ahead and choose a location for the image file. Make sure you put the image on a drive other than the one you are backing up. So if you’re backing up the C drive, put the image on the D drive or on an external drive.

Now your image file will be created depending on the speed of your computer. Once completed, you’ll get two files, an XML file, which is a list of all of the files and a .dat file, which holds all of the actual data.

Restore a backup hard drive image

You can then use the image file to restore individual files or to perform a complete restore of the system to the same hard drive or to a different partition. The one thing to remember though when restoring an image is that the partition you are restoring to needs to be of the same size or larger. You cannot restore to a smaller partition size than the original.

When you restore, you cannot restore to the same drive you’re currently running Windows on. So you’ll have to use another disk as a secondary disk and then restore the image to that disk. Once restored, you can plug that disk back into the computer that crashed. You’ll basically need another computer running the DriveImage XML software working in order to restore the data.

Also, DriveImage XML does not perform incremental backups after the first backup image, so you’ll either have to have a lot of space or you will have to delete older ones.

Overall, it’s an easy way to “ghost” your hard drive and not have to pay anything! The software works very well and has a simple to use and attractive interface. Enjoy! Source via LifeHacker

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10 Responses to “Backup your computer by making an image of your hard drive”

Keith Dsouza said on : December 3rd, 2007 at 3:15 pm

This is a nice way to backup hdd. I remember when I was studying computers people used to talk about ghost installation I believe this will allow you to do just that. I personally backup my data every week on my 500 Gig monster I purchased to backup data.

Madhur Kapoor said on : December 4th, 2007 at 4:03 pm

Wow i never knew we could create an image of Hard disk .

Syahid Ali said on : December 5th, 2007 at 10:38 am

Awesome tool. I’m okay with the backup part but the restoration part? Eerie.

akishore said on : December 5th, 2007 at 10:56 am

Keith - You’re exactly right, it’s basically a free version of Ghost. It works really well.

Madhur - Yeah it’s so much better than copying data back and forth! Much faster.

Syahid - Good question. If you want to restore, you need to have another computer with the software installed. Basically, if your computer crashed, get a new drive, plug it into a secondary computer and tell the program to restore to that disk. Then take the disk out and put it back into the original computer. It’s a little tricky, but will work.

Haris said on : December 6th, 2007 at 11:10 am

I only knew about Ghost. Will give this a try too…

ali said on : December 11th, 2007 at 3:24 am

IT is very good services

Saul said on : December 21st, 2007 at 3:18 pm

“Syahid - Good question. If you want to restore, you need to have another computer with the software installed. Basically, if your computer crashed, get a new drive, plug it into a secondary computer and tell the program to restore to that disk. Then take the disk out and put it back into the original computer. It’s a little tricky, but will work.”

The above is not necessary. You can use BARTPE and use the XML plugin so that you can boot from a CD or DVD and reinstall from the hardrive that contains your backup. There are a number of guides on the internet on how to do that. Three particularly good ones are on the DriveImage xml website. The link is at the bottom of the homepage.

Alex Krenvalk said on : December 26th, 2007 at 3:23 pm

There is a not bad tool - foto recovery, it able recover files from removable media that use the FAT file systems (FAT12/FAT16/FAT32), restore Deleted files, images, photos and other information (photo recovery, foto recovery, image recovery, picture recovery) is recovered and saved in just four steps, application uses several different data recovery methods and algorithms, compatible with Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows XP SP2, Windows 2003, and Windows Vista.

computer - Xbox 360 Forum Says:

[...] it the way you like it, Image it, and then restore the image. That’ll take all of 30 minutes. Backup your computer by making an image of your hard drive Also for Indesign performance, set the Scratch space on a Second HDD opposite from the System Page [...]
March 16th, 2008 at 3:29 am
computer - Page 2 - Xbox 360 Forum Says:

[...] Just create a boot cd with Drive Image XML on it before you do anything. Create a boot cd info Backup your computer by making an image of your hard drive Also for Indesign performance, set the Scratch space on a Second HDD opposite from the System Page [...]
March 16th, 2008 at 10:38 am