Windows 7 backup

[Paul Lower]

Hi
I finally got around to making a backup of my system comprising 227Gb in
total.
It took over 5 hour and at 346Gb I stopped it before it consumed all the
available space and deleted the whole stupid mess from my external hard
drive.
How can a backup of the system be bigger than the whole? It is supposed to
back up data files and the system which does not include the program files.
Furthermore the system should be an image that take up a fraction of the
space of the original.
I could have backed up the data files in a couple of hours and who cares
about the system when it can be reinstalled in about an hour.
The Microsoft backup program is totally pointless. I thought they had got
their act together for Windows 7 but apparently useless bloatware still
occupies disc space.
Have I missed something or have you all come to the same conclusion?
Cheers
Paul

 

[housetrained]

YOU have missed something!

 

[Canuck57]

Hi
I finally got around to making a backup of my system comprising 227Gb in
total.
It took over 5 hour and at 346Gb I stopped it before it consumed all the
available space and deleted the whole stupid mess from my external hard
drive.
How can a backup of the system be bigger than the whole? It is supposed
to back up data files and the system which does not include the program
files. Furthermore the system should be an image that take up a fraction
of the space of the original.
I could have backed up the data files in a couple of hours and who cares
about the system when it can be reinstalled in about an hour.
The Microsoft backup program is totally pointless. I thought they had
got their act together for Windows 7 but apparently useless bloatware
still occupies disc space.
Have I missed something or have you all come to the same conclusion?
Cheers
Paul

MS Backup is pointless. Even if you do get it to work, try recovering...

The best way is to copy your data out. Put a large hard drive in an
older PC, and copy files into it. I use Linux with Samba, but you can
use XPee or whatever. The idea is to get your data into two places (or
more).

Keep all your programs, downloaded or bought on CD and DVDs. You will
need to them reinstall.

If the data is small enough, burn it to DVDs.

A lesser protection is to put 2 drives in your system using the second
drive for data only. Having a copy on both disks is what you want. But
if the OS goes nuts, it could wipe out the copy too so it isn't as good
as off board.

All PCs will eventually fail, and hard drives are a number one cause.
Best to be sure important data is backed up.

For super important stuff I have USB memory sticks.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

I refer Macrium Reflect, and there is a free edition of it available if you
don't mind giving up incremental backups. And both Macrium and Acronis
compress the backups, so they're smaller, not larger, that the original
(but you have to read the backups with the software that created them).