{"id":645,"date":"2014-11-27T06:49:38","date_gmt":"2014-11-27T06:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/?p=645"},"modified":"2014-11-27T06:49:38","modified_gmt":"2014-11-27T06:49:38","slug":"backing-up-your-pc-part-2-creating-a-system-image","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/backing-up-your-pc-part-2-creating-a-system-image\/","title":{"rendered":"Backing Up Your PC\u2014Part 2: Creating a System Image"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my first article, I talked about using a separate drive to store your system backups and that if your PC didn\u2019t have a second drive in your PC\/Laptop, that you should consider buying a USB drive.\u00a0 That being the case, this article presumes you\u2019ve taken care of that task and now you\u2019re ready to create a copy of your system disk to use should disaster strike.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are a number of ways you can back up your PC\/Laptop, but let\u2019s start with Window\u2019s own process for creating a copy of your system drive.\u00a0 Regardless of which flavor of Windows you have installed on your PC, windows has an applet that will create a \u201csystem image,\u201d which is an exact copy of the files on your startup drive at the time you make that image.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And if we\u2019re going to create something we can use to restore our PC, we might want to make sure that \u201cimage\u201d of our system is as clean as possible.\u00a0 Thus, there are a few maintenance items we should take care of first.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That includes running Windows Update to ensure our security updates are all up-to-date.\u00a0 It also includes things like emptying the trash, cleaning up my disk space and removing temporary files,\u00a0 and defragmenting my hard drive (those of you who have an SSD for your system drive wouldn\u2019t need to and shouldn\u2019t defrag your drive).\u00a0 To complete a lot of those maintenance tasks, I use Glary Utilities<\/a>. That\u2019s a free PC maintenance application from Glarysoft.com.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t have that installed, go ahead and click the link and give it a try.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"GU01.fw\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Glary Utilities has a \u201c1-Click Maintenance\u201d screen that performs a number of maintenance tasks to clean up your Registry and Shortcuts, put those temporary internet files you\u2019ve accumulated while surfing the web in the trash and then empty the trash as well as optimize your startup apps.\u00a0 It can even be set to erase any internet tracks that may have been left behind as well as a check and repair, if necessary, of your hard drive.\u00a0 If you check \u201cdisk repair\u201d the scan will take much longer than if left unchecked.\u00a0 I typically use the default checks and click on \u201cScan for issues.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"GU02\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Once the scan is complete, it will show you the results of its scan.\u00a0 If you\u2019d like, you can click on the \u201cshow details\u201d links to see what type of issues it found.\u00a0 Most the time, it\u2019s just unnecessary \u201cvalues\u201d that weren\u2019t set during some software install or some file extension noted in the registry that you\u2019re not using for any of your files.\u00a0 Click \u201cRepair Problems\u201d and it will take care of those issues for you.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Next I click on the \u201cAdvanced Tools\u201d tab, where I click on \u201cDefragment.\u201d\u00a0 For those of you who may not understand why this is important, I\u2019ll digress temporarily.\u00a0 As you save files to and delete files from your hard drive, things get a bit fragmented on your drive, which can slow things down.\u00a0 For example, when saving a file to your hard drive, Windows starts saving the file to the first available empty space.\u00a0 If there isn\u2019t enough space in that location for the whole file, it lays down a marker to the next available space and then starts copying the rest of the file there, and if there isn\u2019t enough empty space there, well, I think you get the picture.\u00a0 Your big file can be split up in a multitude of space across your drive.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Defrag01\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Clicking on \u201cDefragment\u201d will bring up the Disk Defrag utility. \u00a0When it first opens, don’t let it fool you since everything is “green” that everything is hunky-dorey and that you have no fragmentation. It’s just opened the app, it hasn’t analyzed anything yet. \u00a0You have two options: Analyze or Defrag the drives that are checked. “Analyze” just does and quick analysis and displays how much fragmentation is present. \u00a0“Defrag” performs an analysis, displays what it found, and begins to defragment the drive. For what we\u2019re doing here, we\u2019re going to make sure that only the C-Drive is checked and click on \u201cDefrag.\u201d\u00a0 There are other functions we can perform with this tool, but that\u2019s another article for another day.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Defrag02\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You\u2019ll immediately see a change in the screen and be able to see all of the file fragmentation present on your drive (shown in red). If you hover your mouse over the colored squares at the lower right of the window, it will show you what the different colors represent.\u00a0 Once the process is complete, it may not have resolved\u00a0 absolutely every bit of fragmentation on the drive, but it will be enough that our backup won\u2019t be that of a severely fragmented drive.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Okay, now.\u00a0 We\u2019ve completed our drive maintenance, so let\u2019s create a \u201cSystem Image.\u201d\u00a0 With Glary Utilities still open, click on \u201cBackup Your Computer.\u201d\u00a0 The \u201cCreate a System Image\u201d application will open.\u00a0 If your USB drive is plugged powered up and plugged into a USB port, it should show up in the \u201cOn a Hard Disk\u201d list\u00a0 as an available drive upon which you can store a system backup.\u00a0 After ensuring your USB drive (you may have named yours differently than mine), click on NEXT.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"SysImage\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the next screen, make sure your Windows \u201csystem\u201d drive (the C: drive) is selected along with whatever system recovery partition that may have been written to the hard drive by your PC\u2019s manufacturer, and then click on NEXT.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"SysImage02\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You should now have arrived at the confirmation screen showing you what you\u2019re backing up and to which drive it\u2019s being backed up.\u00a0 Click on the Start Backup button \u2026 then go get yourself a cup of coffee, put your feet up and relax.\u00a0 It\u2019 will take a bit of time to complete the backup.<\/span><\/p>\n

You should consider backing up your PC\/Laptop at least once a quarter if you\u2019re a home user who doesn\u2019t create and store a lot of data\/photos on a regular basis.\u00a0 Keep in mind that if it\u2019s month 3 when disaster strikes, you\u2019ll have 3 months of windows updates to install after you restore you PC using your 3 month old system image.\u00a0 If you frequently store new files or install regular updates for the programs on your PC, then you might want to consider creating a new system image monthly.<\/span><\/p>\n

I keep two system images.\u00a0 After I\u2019ve created a third, I delete the oldest one so that my two most-current\u00a0images remain on my backup drive.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are other applications that can be used to create backups of your drive or just certain data on your drive.\u00a0 In my next article, I\u2019ll discuss two similar programs with which to do that: Microsoft\u2019s SyncToy and 2BrightSpark’s SyncBack Free.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my first article, I talked about using a separate drive to store your system backups and that if your PC didn\u2019t have a second drive in your PC\/Laptop, that you should consider buying a USB drive.\u00a0 That being the case, this article presumes you\u2019ve taken care of that task and now you\u2019re ready to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":651,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,72],"tags":[82,77,76,75,78,74,73],"class_list":["post-645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-how-to","category-pc-maintenance","tag-backup","tag-create-a-system-image","tag-defrag","tag-defragment","tag-glary-utilities","tag-pc-maintenance-tasks","tag-system-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":653,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions\/653"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}