Direkt zum Inhalt

Backing up OS drive - Windows 8

Thread needs solution

Hi there,

I am not very experienced at backing up things - so wanted to make sure I am doing the right thing.

I installed Windows 8 (no media disk) and wanted to back up the whole drive in case my HDD crashes. Then I can just pop in a new HDD and restore the image on that without having to reinstall the whole OS.

What I did was, in the [Backup and Recovery] page, I went to [Disk and partition backup] selected "System Reserved" (100MB) and "C:" (120GB) and clicked on [Back up now].

My question is, is this enough? Did I have to configure any other options to ensure that the boot partition be restored properly later? I don't want to just "back up" the files in terms of JUST having all the "data" - I want to ensure that a new HDD will be restored to a bootable state with this image.

Please let me know. Thanks.

0 Users found this helpful

The method you used to create the backup (assuming, to an external drive) is correct. If the system drive that you are backing up is the only hard disk in your system, and only has the two partitions you referred to in your post, then you have a full backup of your system. If there are additional partitions on the same disk, you can either include them in the backup selection process or back them up separately using an additional backup task. If you have more than one hard disk drive in your system, you would need to check that the system can boot with only the Windows 8 system drive attached, to be sure that you are booting from the Windows 8 system disk. Many folks have installed Windows 7 and/or Windows 8 in systems that contain more than one drive and find out later that the boot files and active partition may be a different physical drive than the OS system files.

Since you have not provided any additional data about your system, I can only guess about your partition layout.
On newer systems, you may have disks using the GPT layout (instead of the MBR layout) that will contain additional partitions that also need to be backed up. When these partitions are restored, they would need to be restored in the same order on the disk.

James

Thanks James.

When I installed Windows 8, my HDD structure was as follows: 1 x SDD and 1 x regular HDD (in terms of being connected to motherboard). During the Windows 8 installation process, I only formatted the SDD (system reserved + C:\) and left the regular HDD unallocated. After booting into Win 8 successfully, I formatted the regular HDD from within Windows (E:\). Based on what I said, I would imagine backing up the "system reserved" and "C:\" should be sufficient to fully backup a bootable version of the OS?

Also, can the files that are created during the backup process, be "moved" to another drive or an external HDD? If I do that, the link through Acronis itself will become invalid I am guessing - but I am presuming that I should be able to select the .tib file manually from wherever I move it to without any issues. FYI, I did backup the drives SDD partitions to the other regular HDD, but both are sitting inside the computer. I know it's better to move .tib to an external drive if possible.

Thank you.