How to make a backup Windows image. I keep saying, make an image. Let me show you how to do that. Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com one of the things I talk about frequently
when it comes to basically protecting yourself from almost anything that could
go wrong is to periodically make a backup image of your system,
a backup Windows image. There are many different
different ways to do that. In fact, I have other videos on the site
and articles on the site that discuss using some of the other
tools that are available. However, Windows still includes
a built-in image backup tool. Even though Microsoft says at some point it is going to be removed,
it's still there. And while I'm not a huge fan of it,
it is absolutely better than nothing, and you We don't need
to install anything to use it. So what we're going to do is make a backup image using the Windows
7 backup tool in Windows 11. Let me show you how that works. It's very hard to find as it turns out, but if you know where to look,
it's pretty straightforward. I'm clicking on Start, and I'm going to
search for, of all things, Control Panel. Even after all this time,
Control Panel is still in Windows. I'm going to search
Control Panel for backup. In there is, of course,
Backup and Restore Windows 7. That is the tool that we're
wanting to use to make this happen. Now, you'll notice it says
Windows Backup has not been set up. That will do two things
if we go down that path. It will both create a system image backup,
and it will set up a schedule. I will leave that to your discretion as to whether or not this is the approach you
want to use for your long term backups. My preference is to use a different tool, but I want to show you how to quickly
create just a system image. That's the link, of course,
here that says Create a System Image. It's looking for backup devices in In this
case, it would look for external hard drives that you might have,
other places where it might choose to place the image that
you're about to create. Now, it's found the external hard drives that I have available to me
for placing the backup image. In this case, I have my fake USB drive, but depending on what other drives you
have available to you, it may find one or more of your external
drives or other hard drives you have. I recommend an external USB
hard drive, hence my fake USB. We'll click on Next. That's the backup location. The backup, it tells me it could
take up to 28 gigabytes of space. That's the size of what's on the existing
hard drive that we're backing up. This is what's going to be backed up. It's listing basically the different
partitions that are currently on the physical hard drive,
the recovery environment, the EFI system partition, and of course,
the C drive that we care about. We'll start the backup. Now, exactly how long this backup will
take will depend on a number of factors. It'll depend on how much data you have on your drive because it's
only backing up the data. It will depend on the size of the drive. It will depend on the speed of the drive. It will depend on the speed
of your backup drive. It will depend on the speed
of the interface to the backup drive. As you can tell, there are
a lot of variables at play here. Mine is probably going to take just a few minutes because it's a relatively small
drive and it's an enclosed system. However, yours will probably take
a significantly longer amount of time. Regardless,
rather than make you sit through this backup, however long it might be, we're
just going to fast forward to the end. We're done. The backup Windows image has been created. Now, you'll notice that it's asking me if I want to create a recovery
or system repair disk. Again, that's going to be up to you. That would be a disk stick,
or more often these days, a bootable USB stick that would contain
a recovery environment that would actually allow you to use this backup image to be
able to restore it to your hard disk. You could do that now, you could do that later,
or you could also use the Windows setup disk for your appropriate version
of Windows because it too has the tools on it in order to be able
to restore backup images. I'm not going to do this now because there's so many other ways
that it can happen later. I'll I'm going to go ahead
and click on new, click on close. Now, what does a backup image look like? Well, a Windows backup image is actually
a set of folders on that external drive. I'm going to look at my faux USB drive,
and there it is, Windows Image Backup. If I double click on it, of course, now
it's going to say I don't have permission. That's okay. Since this is an administrator account
that I am logged in as, I can simply go ahead and click Continue
to permanently get access to the folder. We'll click on Continue, and we'll
actually have to do that all the way down. This top level is the name of the machine
that we've backed up, and the next level then has
the information about the backup itself. Here's the backup. You'll see that there are a number of files here of various sorts,
but the ones we care about probably the most are these three down here
at the bottom, the hard disk image file. I'm going to quickly turn on showing
extensions because that's important. These are VHDX file for virtual hard disk extended because it's the second
version of the file format. These are the disk images that represent
each of the partitions on the machine. The rest of this is pretty
much overhead information. You can see this is backup specs. But that's what an image looks like when
you use the Windows 7 backup tool that's built into Windows 10,
Windows 11, and so forth. Having made an image backup,
you now know that you can, if you ever run into a problem,
revert your entire machine to the state it was in at the time
you took this image back up. That's one of the reasons
I love it so much. There's no question about what you need to
back up or where you need to back it up. This tool will do it for you. Like I said earlier, there are other tools that, honestly, I I prefer because they
give you a little bit more flexibility, a little bit more visibility into exactly
what's happening when you back things up. But again, this is absolutely better than no backup at all, and it
doesn't require any third-party download. For updates, for comments, for links related to this
topic and more, visit askleo.com/167436. I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is askleo.com thanks for watching.
