Hard Drive Backup Question

I backup my laptop hard drive to an external USB hard drive using the Windows 7 system image function. Should I be concerned if programs continue to run in the background during the backup? Could this cause an out-of-sync condition where only part of an update is captured in the backup? I guess I’m trying to understand if a system image is really an exact copy of a hard drive at a given point in time. Or does it pick up anomalies because of programs that update the hard drive during the backup?

 

Yeah, in my experience I would be concerned with programs running in the background (especially if they were using any of my data too).

To do a proper system image: remove the HDD and use a bootable imaging tool to write a proper image to another HDD. Even then, I prefer copying my data (only) to multiple drives and simply re-installing the OS.

What you're doing now may or may not work and you'll only know when you'll need it to work.

 

Personally, i backup my files individually and keep a system image of a clean windows 7 install when i need to reinstall windows. very similar to tilleroftheearth's solution.

 

How do disk imaging programs get around this? I assume it would be the same with the backup programs that you could buy. It's not just the built-in Windows 7 system image, right?

 

They get around it by using 'shadow copy' and other stuff built into the O/S.

But that doesn't mean I would trust them though.

And yeah, not just Win7 - I image all of them do it (scarily) like that.