Back Up my Windows 7 install onto another hard drive

[kinglou]

Hello all! I am building a brand new system and I am going with a pretty decent SSD as my main drive and in the past even my traditional hard drives have failed where my OS install was causing me much stress because I lose work and time.

What software would you recommend to back up (clone) my Windows 7 install onto another hard drive. I would want the automated software to do this on a nightly bases. So if my main system drive fails I can point the boot disk to the "backup" drive and proceed as normal. Is this possible?

Thanks.

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hello,

Couple ways you can go to image or incrementally backUp your Windows 7 installation

You can use the built in BackUp and Restore from your Win-7 installation. It images your system disk and then incrementally backs up what has changed. It is set to backUp once a week, but you can set a schedule as often as you want. It's a very good backUp system, and you use the DVD installation disk to start the Image restoration if something happens, or make a Restore startUp disk when you first set it up, with your drivers on it.
Fred Langa recently wrote about it entitled a backUp system you've already paid for.


Other way is to use Acronis True Image Home (~$49 but varies on sale) to Image your complete disk, or backUp whatever you wan on any schedule you want. You use the CD disk or create a startup disk with your drivers on it, to start the Image restoration if something happens

There are other products available, if you search for disk imaging software.

 

[Zenthar]

For simplicity I would also recommend the built-in backup utility.

 

[himnextdoor]

Other way is to use Acronis True Image Home (~$49 but varies on sale) to Image your complete disk, or backUp whatever you wan on any schedule you want. You use the CD disk or create a startup disk with your drivers on it, to start the Image restoration if something happens

Acronis is an excellent solution. It has saved me thousands of hours of installation time.

I have found that Windows back-up seems to A), lower system performance somewhat, and B), it seems to be very greedy about disk space.

I think it must make backups of backups or something.

Anyway, I found it intrusive.