In this article I will tell you how to backup data: work files, multimedia and operating system(make her image). Backup(data archiving) is extremely necessary, since as a result of breakdown hard drive, or a virus, you may lose important documents, photo archives, works created in various programs. Maybe you just want to reinstall a clean copy of the OS with all the programs. Once this happens, the situation will be easy to correct.

The most common case among users is the failure of the operating system. In order to restore the computer to its previous state (programs, settings, etc.), you need to spend from several hours to several days installing and configuring the Windows OS, but the installation of additional software takes the most time. Often inexperienced users store their data on system disk, without thinking about transferring information to other sections of the hard drive, not to mention external HDDs.

Backup (archiving) and recovery methods

Windows 7: Built-in Backup and Restore Tool

It is quite easy to use and even allows you to perform this procedure automatically on a schedule. Location of the backup tool on the system: "Start | All programs | Service | Archiving and recovery". Menu in the left column - "Create a system repair disc" And "Creating a system image".

Creating a system image. It is necessary to indicate the location of the future archive: select another disk partition, external HDD or optical drive (DVD, Blue Ray). There is also the ability to save backup copy on network drive. It is not practical to use optical media, so use a logical drive with sufficient storage space or an external HDD to store the backup. Select a location and click the “Archive” button. The entire system partition will be archived. This procedure can be carried out on a schedule, and Windows updates a previously recorded system image without creating it again, which significantly saves time.

If you select the Backup tool, you can set up regular backups of important user data. To do this, select “Set up backup”, indicate which drive the backup will be saved to, click “Next”, in the next window select “Give me a choice” and then select the objects to be backed up. To restore the contents of a backup, select one of three suggested actions: “Restore my files from this backup”, “Restore files for all users on this computer" or "Manage the disk space this backup takes up."

To restore your system if it won't boot or produces an error that you can't fix, you may need a rescue disk. To create it, select “Create a system repair disk” in the menu on the left and indicate on what media to organize it. Unfortunately, only laser discs are supported, which is not suitable for owners of laptops without an optical drive.

This built-in Windows tool is not without its drawbacks, such as for a long time archive creation and lack of compression function. However, there are other, more functional products.

Backup and restore using Acronis True Image Home 2013

For users of Windows XP, where there is no built-in backup tool, as well as users with higher requirements for the functionality of a backup program, I recommend using Acronis True Image Home 2013.

Acronis True Image Home uses 3 backup methods.

Full image - archiving absolutely all data, including the MBR (if the partition is bootable).

Differential - the backup copy includes only those data that have changed since the creation of the archive using the first (full) method.

Incremental method - allows you to supplement the backup copy with files changed since the last backup procedure.

It’s easy to make a backup copy of the system partition: in the main program window, select the first option - "Backup disks and partitions", then specify a partition or disk, set the location to save the archive and, if necessary, change the archiving parameters (for example, set the compression level of the archive on the "Performance" or protect the archive with a password). At the end of the process, a file with the extension will be created in the storage you specified. *.tib. Acronis True Image Home 2013 allows you to connect a backup copy as a logical drive and work with the necessary data. This way you can extract from a pre-created archive required file, which you accidentally completely deleted from your hard drive.

In addition to backing up partitions and disks, you can archive (including on a schedule) individual directories and files, as well as the Windows address book, contact list and correspondence Microsoft Outlook. To recover in the most severe cases, you can use the bootable version of the program (boot disk or boot disk), and it is possible to create such a solution on both optical and USB media.

It happens that when experimenting with installing several operating systems, the Master Boot Record turned out to be damaged; you can try to “revive” it by checking the “MBR” checkbox when restoring from the image. Also, Acronis True Image Home 2011 can convert backups from its “native” format to VHD format (these are backups created by the system Windows tools 7, and at the same time images of virtual disks, that is, they can be connected to almost any virtual machines) and back.

In most cases, recovery comes down to selecting the desired archive and partition in which the contents of the backup copy will be deployed. It is worth noting the extremely long installation time and low speed Acronis work True Image Home in Windows XP.

Paragon Backup & Recovery Professional: Backup with More Features

About Paragon program Backup & Recovery Professional, which carries out file backup and recovery I told in, however, with a purpose Windows migration to another PC. Unlike the Acronis product, in addition to archiving operations, it also allows you to perform some actions with partitions - for example, changing the label, formatting, hiding and deleting. However, to do this you will need to switch to “Advanced Mode”.

Before backing up, it is recommended to create a rescue disk to restore data from the image. To do this, go to the “Utilities” section and select “Create a rescue disk.” Here you can also choose either optical or external as a media hard drive, or USB flash drive.

To create a backup copy of your data, go to the “Data Protection and Recovery | Intelligent archiving”, without forgetting to prepare reliable storage first. You can choose what to backup: “Disks or partitions”, e-mail ( emails, accounts and address books of Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail), “Media Files” and “Documents” (texts, photos, videos and music stored in the “My Documents” directory) or “Other Files or Folders”.

Next you can make additional options copying - selecting the degree of image compression, password protection and sector-by-sector copying mode (all sectors of the disk are processed “as is”, including unused ones). You can also assign an FTP server as an archive storage, if you have one. If you prefer optical media, the program will warn you that it will be impossible to save the main boot entry disk.

For experienced users, Backup & Recovery has a professional tool for working with images of Virtual PC, VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion virtual machines. Thanks to it, you can convert an image of a real hard drive, such as a system partition, and then open it along with all the data and programs in virtual machine even on another computer.

Due to our own erroneous actions on the computer or a virus attack, it is not possible to download Windows 7 by any means?! Or the operating system boots, but working in it is simply unbearable?! If you are familiar with these situations and would like to correct the situation within a minimum time, you need to prepare in advance for such problems and sometimes (once a month/every two months) make an image of the system and, if necessary, restore the operating system by rolling back to the created image. Windows 7 has a built-in system archiver, which is very simple and intuitive, no need to install additional programs to create an image of your system, and even more so spend money on these programs.

How to make an image Windows systems 7? There are several ways to launch System Archiving, here is one of them. Come along the way
In the window that opens, you will see on the left "Creating a system image"- this tool will allow you to create a system archive once, if you look at the right side of the window, you will see a button, i.e. It is possible to configure archiving automatically.

It is up to you to choose which method suits you; in this article I will describe both of these methods.

Creating a system image

Click "Creating a system image", in the window that opens, select the location where the system backup will be stored, the ideal option is an external hard drive, you can use a CD/DVD, but keep in mind that you will need a lot of them. It is also better not to use a local disk, since in the event of a virus attack, recovery from local disk not always possible.

After choosing a location to save the backup, you need to choose what to archive. If you have enough space, save all local drives. In this example, I will only save drive C.

In the next window, confirm our choice and click "Archive".

Next comes the archiving/system image creation process, which can take quite a while. for a long time, it all depends on the amount of archived space and the power of the computer.

At the end of archiving, the system will offer to write the data to disk, since I’m archiving to an external hard drive, I don’t need this, click “no”, besides, I don’t really want to write 32 GB :)

This completes the process of creating a system image, the backup is located on a removable disk, the folder name is WindowsImageBackup.

Setting up automatic system image creation

I remind you that we originally came along the way “Start-Control Panel-Backup and Restore”,press "Set up backup", in the window that opens, select the location where the system backup will be stored, please note that the specified backup location must be available when it is launched according to a schedule. The ideal option is an external hard drive; CD/DVD is not entirely suitable, since it will not be very practical to spend several disks on each backup. It is also better not to use a local disk, since in the event of a virus attack, recovery from the local disk is not always possible.

In the next window, we select what we will archive or present the choice to the system, i.e. leave it as default, in this example I will leave it as default. Click "Next".

In the next window, select the schedule for executing the system image, I recommend once a month, although this is individual, it all depends on how often you make changes to the system.

After clicking "Save settings and start archiving", the archiving process will begin. System archiving can take a long time, up to several hours, it all depends on the amount of data and the speed of the computer.

I hope you will never need a system backup, but situations are different and to be on the safe side, I strongly recommend making an archived image of the system.