MFT Backup?

I'm using Windows XP. Is there a way to backup just the MFT? Wondering if there might be a little piece of software out there that would do this?

Is the MFT automatically restored as part of a Windows System Restore -- or can it be restored individually from a Macrium Reflect image backup (without restoring the entire image)?

 

TomAZ,

Why would you need to do that? Restoring MFT without restoring the rest of the file system will most likely just corrupt your files.

Isso

 

Not really sure. I don't really know that much about the whole Windows file structure system. Guess I just thought that if the MFT were to become corrupt, it could be easily restored, but sounds like I may have been wrong about that.

So back to my other question. . . would a System Restore accomplish this?

 

No, System Restore doesn't restore MFT directly. Actually no other tool does that, because MFT holds a bunch of pointers to the other locations of the drive, so restoring it without restoring the rest of the drive will corrupt the file system

Isso

 

Any imaging program grabs the mft and all those little metafiles. At the same time it also gets the other files, your files.

So by default, both those are "matched" and stay consistent. There's your backup.

To do one but not the other is asking for disaster. It would be like switching the table of contents and index from one book to another. It ain't gonna match up!