Recovery and system reserved issues.. Pls Help;0)
Hi everyone...
Glad to be apart of this great community..
I've messed about with a few of the free HD image tools out there
but couldn't get anything to work properly...
Went ahead and bought True-Image 2013 tonight.
Having some trouble and I really hope someone can help me out.
Here's what I want to be able to do -
- Backup my entire system on an external USB HD in case I have
to revert back to a stable system OR go back to when everything
was working well..
I have the following available to backup -
Local Disk (c:)
system Reserved (I:)
The 'system Reserved' is really confusing me.
Do I have to back this up??
When I tried to do a test recovery from the boot disk I
was asked to tick the following boxes.
See attached photo -
Do I tick them all??
Can anyone help me here,
thanks
Click on link #2 below and the very first screen will illustrate what should be backed up. In summary, you want to include all partitions so the backup will be totally inclusive of everything on the disk. You want to include the C partition plus the System partition plus any other partitions revealed by looking at the Windows Disk Management.
The importance of the System Partition is that you will probably not be able to boot your computer if you were to restore only drive C. also where the system partition is placed and whether it is the active partition is also important. Look at link #3. That guide will show you how to restore only drive C (item 3 within that link); or restore everything inside the backup to a new or old disk (item # 2 within the link); or restore your backup to a larger disk (item #2 within that link)
My preference and recommendation is that the backup should include everything within the backup. Another school of thought is to make a separate backup of each partition which in your case, makes no sense as your other partitions are very small and space is not an issue for such a small partition. Also, if your backup is all inclusive, this make the use of the "disk option" restore to be much easier. This is the restore references in link #3 below as the #2 example.
Based on the 120GB of used space, you can expect your first full backup to be approx. 80-90GB is size. Normal Compression.
Before you perform you next backup, I suggest that you modify the volumne name of drive C to be more specific as to its content. Change the blank Drive C to something like "Win7-64_C" if you have a Windows 7, 64 bit system. This can be accomplished by right clicking on Drive C icon or listing and choose properties and add the name details. This change is important in that your Recovery CD is Linux and it could list your drive letters differently. When doing a restore, do not use drive letters as the match. Use disk size, name and other characteristics so you do not restore to the wroing disk.
Really appreciate the help, thanks:)