With over a decade of writing experience in the field of technology, Chris has written for a variety of publications including The New York Times, Reader's Digest, IDG's PCWorld, Digital Trends, and MakeUseOf. Chris has personally written over 2,000 articles that have been read more than one billion times-and that's just here at How-To Geek. Microsoft eventually restored the graphical option to make people happy, which is fine - but they were right that most Windows users shouldn't use it.Ĭhris Hoffman is the former Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek. Microsoft's motive was pretty clear here - average PC users shouldn't be distracted by system image backups and should just use a simple backup solution like File History. After widespread complaints, Microsoft restored this option to the graphical interface. While developing Windows 8.1, Microsoft removed the "System Image Backup" option from the user interface and forced people to access it from a PowerShell window. On a Linux PC, you can use the low-level dd utility to make an exact copy of a drive and restore it later.Īcronis True Image and Norton Ghost are popular third-party disk imaging tools you can use for this, too. Time Machine backs up system files as well as your own files, and you can restore a Mac from a Time Machine backup from Recovery Mode. On a Mac, you can use Time Machine create and restore system image backups. A server or other mission-critical computer could be configured and a system image created to restore the software to that specific state. These types of images can also be used by system administrators, who could roll out a standard system image on different PCs across their network. Of course, if both drives can fit in your computer at once, you may be better off using a system imaging program to copy the contents of your hard drive directly to the SSD rather than creating a system image backup and then restoring from that, which will take twice as long. This will migrate your entire operating system to the SSD. You can create a system image of your computer's hard drive, swap the drive out for an SSD, and then restore that image to the SSD. For example, let's say you want to upgrade your computer's hard drive - maybe you're upgrading from a slower mechanical hard drive to a speedy solid-state drive. Related: How to Migrate Your Windows Installation to a Solid-State Drive System images are just one of the many back up tools included in Windows. For maximum compatibility, you should use the same tool you used to create the system image to restore it. Windows itself creates system images that contain multiple files with the. Some system image programs use compression to shrink the system image's size by as much as possible, but don't count on saving much space in this way.ĭifferent system image programs use different types of system images. So, if you have 500 GB of space used on a 1 TB drive, the system image will be about 500 GB. The system image contains a complete snapshot of everything on the computer's hard drive at any given time. You then have a complete system image you can copy back onto a drive to restore the system state. A system imaging program looks at the hard drive, copying everything bit by bit. Related: 8 Backup Tools Explained for Windows 7 and 8Ī system image is a file - or set of files - that contains everything on a PC's hard drive, or just from one single partition.
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