Image or clone - what's my best back-up strategy

I've looked at various posts on these forums before posting this .... so I apologise in advance
if it's already been covered.

I'm a little confused here.

I'm currently making my regular backups on two separate external hard-drives.
One is made using EaseUs and one with Aomei Backupper , both of them are the free versions.

The more I read on here , the more I realise that I need to learn a lot more about back-up procedures.

If my laptop's internal HD failed , what would be the easiest / quickest method to get up and running again ?
A system restore from an image or from a clone , of the internal HD ?

I made a System Rescue Disc shortly after buying the laptop , using the bundled Windows utility.

When I first used Backupper , I tried to make a new Rescue Disc using their utility but failed because
of a Windows module not being pre-installed in my OS.
Then I downloaded and burned a disc of Windows Automated Install Kit , to try to make the Backupper
utility work , but went no further with it.
So I have no way of knowing if I really need the Rescue Disc from Backupper to restore from back-ups
made with their software.

In a way I'm fortunate , because I've never needed to do a full system restore , but it bothers me that
if I needed to , I might find that the backups I have been carefully making are not going to work .

Ironically , the most likely scenario where I might need to restore is probably following a Windows Update ....
( see here #12 )

Any advice will be much appreciated.

W7 SP1 64-bit

 

Images. Clones are for upgrading to a SSD or to a larger HD.

You need to create AOMEI boot media and test it does boot.

Can you post a screenshot of Disk Management? The partition layout is important.

 

Thanks Brian K , I assume that means back to the Windows AIK , which I was reluctant to install.
It seems like a big file when I need just one little bit of it ..... guess I could uninstall it after using it .

From what I've read , it seems only my edition of W7 does not have the necessary utility bundled ( WinPE ? )

My other back-ups are made with EaseUS Todo Backup ( Free ) and I never saw an option to burn a rescue disk.....
.... but once again , I've never tried , or needed to do a full restore and I don't want to find out the hard way
that I can't restore from those back-ups !

I took a screen shot but can't see how to attach it on this forum .... all the options seem to want a URL

EDIT .... OK got it , see below ..... I just can't work out how to do it in "edit" mode

 

- Screenshot of Disk Management
Pretty basic and simple , as you can see ....
.... when I use Linux I boot off a USB Flash drive .... I just couldn't be bothered with dual-boot .

 

Yes, uninstall it when you don't need it. It takes up 3 GB of space.

You MUST have rescue media otherwise you can't restore an image.

The System Reserved and the OS partition are the only important ones. Note, the System Reserved partition is the Active partition, not the OS partition. But you should create one Entire Disk image as it is easy to restore if you have a HD failure. After creating that image you only have to create images of the OS partition as the SRP and Recovery partition don't change.

 

I had a look at AOMEI. Click Utilities, Create Bootable Media, Windows PE. etc.

With Win8.1 you don't need WAIK. I don't know about Win7.

 

You need it, it's not included in 7.
But there's a difference in which version of WinPE you use.
PE3 was 1.6GB download whereas
PE5 (based on W8.1) was only 384MB IIRC.

With Macrium Reflect it's very easy to create the media choosing PE3, PE4 or PE5 within the Reflect UI.
I've never tried Backupper so I don't know what it's options are or how easy or difficult it is.

J

 

I looked at Win7 and created AOMEI USB boot media. WAIK wasn't needed.

 

Thanks to all for the helpful suggestions .

I'll have to make a rescue disk with AOMEI after installing WAIK.

I'm still puzzled as to why EaseUS doesn't prompt me to make one for their backups.

Anyway , it seems I've been doing the right thing in making back-up images rather than clones !

W7 SP1 64-bit

 

See above. WAIK isn't needed.

 

From Backupper "Utilities" I chose the option " Windows PE - Create bootable disc..... "

There must be something odd about my edition of W7 , jwcca commented on this ( above )
This is as far as I can get :-

 

WADK is the smaller one based on W8.1, that's the one you want.