Backup Your System Before It Goes Wrong
It can be a real pain when a computer system encounters fatal errors or fails to boot. Solving these type of problems are not too easy as the whole drive may needs to be reformatted & reinstalled with a fresh copy of Windows. This is a horrible process, every single driver & software will then needs to be reconfigured. Despite the lost of data, it is very time consuming.
Another scenario is where you want to move your existing Windows from one hard drive to another. This cannot be done with “copy & paste” in Windows Explorer, some files can only be created in the installation process.
The solution here is to use a Disk Cloning Utilities to backup the existing system. This is useful when you want to restored your system back to the original state with all the drives, software & configuration intact. If anything goes wrong to your system, you can easily reinstall or move your Windows to any hard drive at anytime.
Using DriveImage XML for Disk Cloning
There are plenty of free Disk Cloning Utilities around the net, but I have only tried DriveImage XML. DriveImage XML is an easy to use utility for system & data backup. It can backup the whole hard drive & create bit-by-bit compressed mirror image of data in the drive. The image being created is smaller than the original, my 15GB system in a 60GB partition has been compressed into 8GB multiple files image.
DriveImage XML runs under Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Vista and Windows 7 only. The program will backup, image and restore drives formatted with FAT 12, 16, 32 and NTFS. The image can be restored back to the system without having to reboot.
If you do not have a image copy of your Window system, go ahead & give DriveImage XML a try. Backup your system & keep the backup image files in separate drive location.
(Note: DriveImage XML has successfully backup my Windows XP laptop system. Nevertheless, DriveImage XML is unable to detect my Window 7 notebook system hard drive. Alternatively, you can use the backup utility that comes with Windows 7, however I still prefer the whole hard drive to be cloned. Perhaps, the workaround is to boot DriveImage from a CD-ROM, I’m going to try WinPE later for the solution.)
