Free imaging software for Windows

update:

Windows 7 does not do incremental.
i just tested.
it overwrites the previous image.

i am still testing for incremental, be back in a few minutes.

 

first, i must apologize to Bigabe.

he was correct in saying Windows 7 imaging has compression et incrementals.

i created another image this morning (in the same location as the original, which i've never tried before)
and when i tried to restore i was given the option of selecting a time and date to restore.
i checked the size of the backup folder/files to make sure it was indeed an incremental.

Windows 7 took 13 Gb of used disk and compressed it to 7.7 Gb in 4:30 minutes.

the restore time took 3:30 minutes.
when it comes to restore time, Windows 7 is a speed demon!

by comparison, Drive Snapshot default compression reduced the file size to 4.16 Gb and created the backup in 2:58 seconds.
that's very fast.

on the other hand, the restore took 4:56 minutes + 1:30 minutes to wait for the green OK sign to come up.
so about 6:30 minutes total.

from the beginning of Window 7 i always heard "Windows 7 does not do incremental and does not use compression".
i've heard it often enough to believe it. without testing it...

live and learn i guess.

 

It isn't well documented by MS and informations about it are not easy to find. I'm the opposite of what you would call a MS fanboy but after trying every free solution of backup software out there and some commercial software, too, in the last month and after I had several problems with all of them, one more severe than the other I have to commit that MS did a very good job.

A lot of ppl, me included, tend to damn MS because of their promises for OS features in the past and because most of their implemented features have been so bad that using them was like playing Russian roulette.

But IMHO I don't think that for private usage shadowprotect isn't worth the money you have to spend for it and the other solutions may be better in compression but as moontan tested the compression isn't bad at all.

And really, if you spend your money on an external HD and using a backup solution build into the OS is much better than buying some sluggish software that may compress you files 5% better and is a little faster or may have features which you don't use after playing some weeks with it.

Per example real time backup:
who would use such a feature for private PCs?
If you are an architect or programmer and 10 mins of work mean everything, yea, ok, but most of those programs you tend to use in such jobs have implemented real time backup or auto safers.

And most backup solutions lack the most important thing at all:
Good recovery solutions.
Because they have no money they often don't buy licenses for Windows bootcds so they offer you some kind of Linux that may or may not work on your PC depending which hardware you use. A lot of them have problems with usb3 per example.
The most funny thing is that when I understood it right one vendor does offer a windows PE build but you have to pay again if you want to download it another time which is more than ridiculous because if you are in possession of a legal copy of windows you can download a Windows PE builder for free.

 

you know,

i've imaged and restored well over 100 times since using the W7 RC.
not once did it fail at creating a backup or restoring an image.

if i wasn't using Windows 7 i would most likely choose Drive Snapshot as my imager of choice.
it is really good.

 

Good stuff. Like I said above, we use Microsoft's imaging (imagex) for our servers at work. Saves the cost of Ghost licensing. Bad points for us are compression (~6% is the most we can get it to compress) and it's lack other options like resizing.

For home I don't use it at all. I prefer some other options from third-party tools. Drive Snapshot is excellent (just bought this one).

 

Hello,
I have a question regarding the incremental update. When restoring, do you have to select the main backup and then the incremental or by selecting the incremental, it will automatically restore using the main backup.

Thanks.

 

with Windows 7 imaging, you just save to the same drive you saved your original image.
it will then automatically save the incremental to the same folder, "WindowsImageBackup".

when you restore, you will be given the option to restore an image with the time and date you want.

 

Thank you for the clarification. My son's laptop has Windows 7 and we would do a total image backup about once a month because he backs up most things on a flash drive. I guess we will be using the incremental backup feature more often now though.

Microsoft should highlight this. Does any of the free backup software even offer an incremental backup?

 

i think Macrium and Paragon do.
there's probably more.