Make a bootable image of Operation System
Hello,
First, I have to say that I don´t know if my question fits in this forum area.
I want to create an image of my own windows operation system bootable, this is, I did yesterday a format to my own computer, I installed all again (hardware drivers, and other custom things, like basic software), and what I want to do is to avoid having to install everything again whenever I have to reformat my computer, I want to do an image of my Operation System at this point, and so after that, in near future when I want to do a pc format, I can use this personal image of my computer!!
It is possible to do this with Acronis?!
Can you tell me which option that does this on Acronis, can you guide me please?
Thank you
Joao Dimas
Acronis TrueImage Home 2011
Check out the "How to's"
http://kb.acronis.com/content/13414#
Hello Mark,
Thank you very mutch for your help!
Hum ok... I thing this is a kind of snapshot like VMware snapshot... isn´t it?
Tell me another thing... in near future when I want to do a refresh image to my system... all things return like as I had when I did the image backup? All sectors of the disk remained intact as they were? In terms of performance of the hardware is there anything that becomes affected after the restore image?
Thank you,
Kind regards,
João Dimas - Portugal
Joao:
You are correct. The process is much like a VMware snapshot.
For a physical hard disk, when you restore an image the disk is restored almost exactly like it was at the moment of image creation. I say "almost" because all of the "in-use" sectors are restored to the disk, but not necessarily to the exact same original sector location. From the operating system's viewpoint, however, that doesn't make any difference. All of the programs, files, etc. are restored and will work just like before.
There is a special mode in TrueImage called "sector-by-sector" imaging where all of the sectors, both in-use and not in use, are included in the image file and when this image is restored, all of the sectors go back exactly where they came from. This special mode has limited use. The normal imaging mode will serve for 99% of all needs, and it results in much smaller image files. A sector-by-sector image file is as large as the disk being backed up, whereas a normal image generally is about half as large as the used space on each partition because of compression and because certain Windows files like the paging file and hibernation file do not need to be included in the image since Windows will re-create them at boot time.
One use for a sector-by-sector image is to do forensic recovery of a crashed hard disk. In this case you would want to try file recovery on a copy of the crashed disk so that your recovery techniques do not make things worse, so a sector-by-sector image will copy everything, including all of the disk corruption, and allow you to restore to a test hard disk. But normally this mode is rarely needed.