I have received a new laptop and installed all drivers and necessary apps. hile the windows 7 install is fresh and fast I was wondering how I could make a bootable backup of the system in current state?
Preferably, if my windows install gets corrupted I would like to just boot from the cd and reinstall windows to restore back to this state.
Thanks for your help.
Of top of my head - R-Drive Image, Norton Ghost. I worked with both and they are okay. However there is at least 50 more that I never tried...
There are a great number of products that have this kind of functionality. Prices range from free to costly, and similarly quality can vary. But in general, this kind of problem has been figured out a long time ago, so even the clunkier solutions still work well.
I would suggest that you search for Windows 7 bare metal backup solutions, try out the ones that you can, and then pick one that best fits your functionality and price requirements.
Besides all the backup programs suggested by other commenters, there are builtin options:
http://www.petri.co.il/working-with-system-image-backups-in-windows-7.htm http://www.petri.co.il/restore-windows-7-from-backup-image.htm
Basically you can save your hard drive to a file on another computer or another drive within your computer (the latter is less secure) and then boot off Windows installation DVD or special system restore disc to restore your system.
I use Clonezilla, both at home and work. It's free, and works perfectly. It isn't too difficult to figure out either. Back it up to a USB connected disk, or to a server of some kind on your network (FTP, SAMBA, etc)
