Creating a backup image from on hd to another

B

butterfliesrpretty

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 15, 2002
Messages
2,482
I'm embarrassed to admit, I've been here 12 years and know shit all about backups from one hd to another. Guess I've been lucky never had a western digital drive fail on me so that's what I use.

Now in my main pc I have a western digital black that's getting very long in the tooth, still runs fine, but I'm scared since I'm starting to do some real work on my pc these days. I'm making a game and have tons of information that needs backed up on a regular basis.

Anyway is there a way to create an image of this hard drive onto another so that I would be able to just put the new one in, and it would be like I hadn't skipped a beat and be able to work off that without having to reinstall all my programs (after the image conversion of course)?
 
Win7 has this built in. I did it once just to see if worked. I think win8 has but there were changes.
 
mtrupi said:
Win7 has this built in. I did it once just to see if worked. I think win8 has but there were changes.
Click to expand...

The only gotcha to watch out for is that the Windows 7 bootable disc that you make should you ever need to recover will not boot in EFI mode. Which means that it will not reimage disks that were set up as EFI. It will do the initial backup just fine though.

Windows 8 fixed this. But can be a very serious issue for people who are running EFI BIOS mode on newer motherboards.

But outside of that, the Windows 7 Backup & Restore system is very usefull.

There are other free programs that can do this. I use a Linux Live CD and just use "dd" command. But that may not be intuitive for many.
 
What I use is CloneZilla that i boot from a USB stick.
It is free and can clone from one disk to another or to/from an image on a network share.
 
You could also do a RAID1 for uptime and not worry about having to get the backup drive, maybe not totally current, while in the middle of working. You would still backup to a third drive of course.
 
Linux livecd using dd_rescue:

dd_rescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb

You need to replace sda and sdb with the proper device paths.

For windows I'm a big fan of DriveImageXML, its powerful, simple, and free.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top