Windows 7 Backup & Restore -- Any Good?

[WeApOn]

So I've previously backed up my PC by throwing my C:/Users/<username> folder on my second internal HD from time to time. I also took a Symantec Ghost image of my PC, which I use for my work images.

I took a shot with the "Backup and Restore" utility built into Windows 7, and was wondering if anyone has used it and would share their thoughts on it.

Will this do incremental updates after my first major update? I scheduled it for Sundays at 7(the default), and would love if it only made changes as opposed to copying my entire filesystem over again. I did tell it to take images of my OS drive, so I would assume that whole process would need to be redone each time.

Has anyone tried restoring? There are alot of catalog and bin files, which I would assume Windows would be able to read to restore my OS. Can I trust these?


Really, all I want is something that will do a diff between my B:/<username> and my C:/Users/<username> folders and send over the changes.

Any opinions are greatly appreciated.

 

[NDSUTopGun]

I've enacted Windows Backup and Restore Center onto my secondary hard drive. I think it works pretty well. It will run incremental updates like you stated, and I'm pretty sure that it takes a system image during each update as well. I've actually got to use a system image to restore my computer after Windows crashed on me and had no other way to save my computer. I was pretty glad that I had that system image.

 

[WeApOn]

I've enacted Windows Backup and Restore Center onto my secondary hard drive. I think it works pretty well. It will run incremental updates like you stated, and I'm pretty sure that it takes a system image during each update as well. I've actually got to use a system image to restore my computer after Windows crashed on me and had no other way to save my computer. I was pretty glad that I had that system image.

Awesome. That's essentially what Symantec Ghost does. How well did it work? Was your OS and every setting restored identical to how it previously was?

That system image probably takes awhile to backup each week, which kinda sucks. I was hoping for a quick differential backup that lasts a few minutes.

Assuming it works well, I guess I could just take one image and then use that to restore my OS and use the file backups to restore all my files. Would essentially be the same that way...

 

[2048Megabytes]

What is the goal here WeApOn? I do not understand what you are trying to do.

When you cloned your Windows partition was the hard drive you cloned to unformatted? If not you will likely not be able to boot the cloned operating system. Also, you need to copy the "MBR" and mark the partition as active so you can boot from this cloned drive.

 

[WeApOn]

What is the goal here WeApOn? I do not understand what you are trying to do.

When you cloned your Windows partition was the hard drive you cloned to unformatted? If not you will likely not be able to boot the cloned operating system. Also, you need to copy the "MBR" and mark the partition as active so you can boot from this cloned drive.

No, all I want is an image FILE so that if my main HD does crash, I'll be able to use that image file to restore my OS.

I've currently got a GHOST(.gho) file that I could use if something happens to my main drive, but was inquiring about Windows Backup to see how they handle restoring and if they would be just as good, if not better. I'm extremely familiar with Ghost, and I would love to hear from someone with good knowledge of Backup & Restore to see if it's worth the switch.

As for weekly things, all I want to do is copy what's on my main OS drive to my other HD that's used as a failover backup.

 

[techdude12]

I backup everything on my computer on an online service, I dunno why I just prefer it and its just easy as well because then I can get access to all my files from other computers too.

Pretty good really and if you have the money I would recommend you look into a service which can provide this for you!