Image Backup & Windows VISTA

I have almost no experience with Windows VISTA. All of "my" home PC's are Windows XP Pro SP3.

I was suggesting to someone with a Dell laptop (Windows VISTA Basic SP1) to start routinely imaging his hard drive with Image for Windows (Recommended based on simple bootable Restore DVD's and reliability). When I first looked at his laptop it showed the used disk space to be ~120 GB. A little later, he said that he had cleaned up the hard drive and the used disk space was then showing ~90 GB. He does not have many additional programs installed and only some i-tunes music. It is my understanding that Windows VISTA has something called "Volume Shadow Copy" which may be eating up a lot of the disk space.

How does a Windows VISTA user manage their OS so that the used hard disk space is minimal so that it is feasible to do an Image Backup to DVD's.

Thank you.

 

well thats pretty much impossible.
it would need at least 2 dvd's even for an install without any programs installed.
even windows 7 takes 8gb without any programs installed.
the better solution is to backup to an external hard drive.
when your ready to setup a routine setup turn off system restore as you would on xp. volume shadow copy on vista basic is just system restore.

 

Agreed.

If you make your system partition lean by keeping all your data on a separate partition you'll have a fairly small image that you can just save to even a decent sized USB stick.

For example, I have a 50GB system partition with 16GB used. Using Macrium Reflect on medium compression, I get a 7.3GB image that I keep on an 8GB USB stick. Takes only a few minutes to both create / restore.

philby

 

I backup to my second internal drive on my desktop machine.
my system partition is 50gb with 18gb used with quite a few programs installed. iit will be less used once I get windows 7.

 

I too have a Dell laptop and it does not come pre-installed with anything that can consume 120 GB!!
My system with vista home premium and dell installed software was around 14 GB if I remember correctly.

The VSS itself does not consume any space on hard drive. System restore uses VSS to take snapshots and by default it is designed to take up to 13% of drive for snapshot usage. There is not point in having system restore snapshots within a backup image so you should disable it by going to "my computer properties" --> advanced system setting --> system protection.
By disabling it you will lose all restore points and recover around 10 GB of space.

Your friend must have audio/video files stored on his system to cause the extra disk usage.

Remind him that you are not working for any copyright enforcement group and if he has illegal backups of DVDs on his system he can tell you without any fear.

Go to vista built in search and run a search for following keys after enabling "search hidden, system files" option

*.avi, *.mpg, *.vob, *.mp3

If that does not help then download tuneup utilities 2009. It has a Tuneup disk space explorer under the "free up disk space" tab. Run it and it will show you drive usage broken down with respect of extension like videos, music, documents etc.

Disable hibernation on the system it will recover around 3 GB of space.

Also, like others suggested, partition the hard drive into something like 45GB C partition for your OS and programs only and rest D partition for music/documents/videos etc.

Then only backup C partition. The backup size will be very small.

Hope this helps....

 

Recently I did a simple test on a Windows 7 Beta with a moderate amount of software installed. I imaged (with Image for DOS, standard compression) to DVD the C: Partition along with that small System Partition that Windows 7 creates. The image mostly filled one Single Layer DVD+R. I think that I deleted all except the most recent restore point before making the Image.

 

There must be a lot stuff still stored on that HD. I have a lot, and considering that my system is double (I have permanently a clone of my OS with First Defense PC Rescue) it is just under 50 GB.

 

TheKid7,

Similar size to my image of Windows 7 just after it was installed. The image was 3.0 GB.

Did you discover what was consuming 90 GB of your friends HD? Sometimes System Restore runs amok and uses 30+ GB. Check his System Volume Information folder. You will need to Show Hidden Files and Folders as well as Show Protected operating system files.

 

Obviously something there.

yeah
DOes blista have some other ( than system restore ) utility running for saves?
Another possibility is some built in Dell "make a restore" utility running in background ??
( I dont have a dell, but my IBM systems were eating disc space with their default save toolkit in action in the background: exponential disc space loss !!)
Pretty clean XPSP3 install here = 5G