Backup my stuff

Haha, alright, so, I have OCD and I usually do a clean install of Windows 7 about once every 3 or 4 months because I usually end up installing stupid files or something that I never use again.

I have an external 500gb USB drive, wouldn't it be easier to just copy the state that I always go back to and back that up on the drive so that instead of fresh installing everytime, I just go to the hard drive and copy that state over my bloated install?

Is this possible? How so? Thank you! Rep will be handed out!

 

When you get your installation the way you want it on your hard drive after a fresh install use any number of backup programs to create an image of your HD. When you get the urge in the future to go back to that fresh install just perform a restore of that saved image. You will have to perform a Windows Update after restoring the image of course as any updates since the image will not have been installed.

Windows 7 already has a backup program to do just that in the maintenance folder and also allows you to create a restore disk to boot from to get access to your external HD when you want to perform a restore.

There are free and paid for software to do the same such as Acronis True Image, Easeus Todo Backup, Macrium Reflect, DriveImage XML, CloneZilla, Norton Ghost, etc.

I have used the Windows 7 built in backup and Acronis True Image, they both will do what you want as well as the others listed above.

 

For the windows backup method, you don't need a repair disk. When windows boots up, just select "repair windows 7" and restore the image from there.

 

"bare metal restore" is what you're looking at. Do some 'net searches on that term.

 

That's what I do and it's a much better way than a clean re-install considering all the drivers and applications you have to add and the configuration you perform to get windows to be like you want. It's also infinitely faster, the Win7 OS install by itself takes forever.

I just bought Acronis True Image for this and it's nice to take a snapshot of the OS partition every once in a while, especially while setting up a new machine. I made images of the clean install, one with all the drivers, one with all the applications and a final one or two once I had everything configured to my liking. From now on I'll mostly just back up documents which I keep on a separate partition.

That said, my XP desktop is still running it's original XP clean install which was done when new six years ago. I'm up to 975,000 files, a lot of junk but the whole thing just keeps on ticking.

 

On the other paw, with Win7 and the new WIM install methods, it takes a lot less time to get an OS installed and running than it used to.

I keep all of my personal software installers on a DVD. Once Win7 is up and running, I just click on my installers one after the other. Other than the full-load of Office 2007 I use, this doesn't take much time at all.

And now that rt7lite (as a front end for WAIK) is getting more mature/capable, building a customized Win7 install image including applications is getting to be as easy as it was with nlite and addons.

Yah, everyone want to restore an image they captured from a running system, but that takes time. Whether or not it take more or less time than doing a fresh install from a customized WIM image is something to be researched.

 

I have an m11x (came with a 160G stock). Updated all, then cloned it over to a 750G I bought from newegg. With the 750G, I cannot run updates, plus I get the "Windows Genuine" popup (which doesn't work either) every now and then.

The way I cloned it:
I also have an m17x. This has two esata internal bays. I stuck both the 160 (source) and 750 (target) and booted with Clonezilla and did a drive to drive clone. After I booted the 750, I used Windows Disk Management tool to resize the partition.

Is there some internal DRM in Win7 that uses the serial number of the HD, and is there some way to re-authenticate windows to use the new HD?