Backup of Windows

Adam recently posted [livejournal.com] that he was looking for a way to backup/clone a Windows installation. There are a number of pieces of commercial software that will do the job (some better than others, of course). I use a different approach to backing up and cloning Windows installations...

What I have found is that it is pretty easy to make a backup of a Windows installation from another operating system. For instance, if you had two different Windows installations on the same computer, you could use one to make a full and complete backup of the other one (by simply copying the files from one location to another, then compressing or burning to disk).

It is kind of annoying (and time-consuming) to install Windows a second time, for the sole purpose of backing up the first one. Plus, if your hard drive dies and you have to replace it, you would have to install from scratch before you could restore the image that you created.

This is why I use linux. On all of my Windows computers, I have a small partition on the hard drive with a bare-bones linux installation (no GUI) that I use to back up the Windows installation from. The partition is large enough to store a copy of the Windows installation, so that when I want to reinstall, I just have to wipe the Windows partition and copy the files from one partition to the other. I reinstall all of my Windows computers once a year, and it takes a fraction of the time it would take to install from scratch.

If you didn't want to put a linux partition on your hard drive, you could use a Knoppix live-CD [knoppix.org] (or similar) to burn a copy of the Windows installation directly to DVD (and then you could easily restore in the same manner).

Using this method gives me full control over what is backed up and how. I have found that a clean Windows installation with drivers, etc can be burned onto a DVD (after deleting pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys).