Does anyone actually use Windows 7 Backup?

[Carson Dyle]

I use Windows 7 Backup to do nightly backups to a network share and I have it also include a system image. Today I totally hosed a major application. Too far gone to just restore the old application configuration and data folders. So I thought I'd take the extreme measure and do a system restore from last night's Windows backup image. I'd lose little, if any new data from today.

I figured it would be pretty automatic. Not quite. The system basically reboots into a safe mode, knowing only that you rebooted because you want to do a system restore. Since my backup image is out on a network share (and for some reason, it doesn't know that) you have to tell it where to find the image, and only then does Windows load its network drivers. Then, of course, you have to login to the remote compter and share. This is what I couldn't get past, for I don't know what reason. I don't know if the authentication failed, or if networking failed, or ...

Right now I'm copying the 103GB system image to a local drive. I'll try again and hopefully have better luck.

 

[Tsavo]

I tried it once, just for a test. It failed pretty miserably.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Holy crap. It actually worked.

Was going to try to figure out if the file backup could still be done to a network share, while the system image is done to a local disk. But I'm not sure how important that is now. Hopefully, I'll only have to rarely do a system restore like this in the future. If worst comes to worst I can always do the same thing again.

I need to do some better testing of the file restoration process too. Could be time to bite the bullet and buy some real backup software.

 

[JimKiler]

I have never used Windows backup. I have enabled and occasionally used System Restore which a 90% success rate. I remember one time on Win 7 system restore could not fix my PC and i would get annoying pop up messages all the time.

 

[Carson Dyle]

The worst consequence of it all is that I have to sift through today's email again. Definitely not a big deal.

One nice thing is that the little bit of work that I did do today, the files were all located in my Dropbox. All of it survived the restore (as it should).

 

[cubby1223]

Since you're on the subject...

last time I tried to work with Windows 7 backup there was no way to limit the file usage of the backups. It would just keep backing up more and more copies to the destination until the storage space is full and then quit out, demanding you go in and manually delete older backups before it would work again.

Has this been fixed?

 

[Carson Dyle]

I'm not sure. I see some info in the Help about being able to choose how many backups and system images to keep. But I sure can't find where or if it's possible to actually change those settings.

To control how much disk space is being used, you can choose how many file backups and how many system images Windows keeps.

By default, Windows automatically saves as many system images as it has space for without taking up more than 30 percent of space on the backup disk.

In the Backup and Restore app there's a "Manage space" link that takes you to a page where you can view space used and you can manually delete old backups. But I have exactly _one_ backup shown as "8/15/2014 to 3/2/2015". :\

Yeah, I need to look into some real backup software. Thanks.

 

[MustISO]

I use it on two of my systems and have set it up for many people. Does what I need it to do, image level backup and file backups daily. I've recovery a few machines using nothing more than Windows 7 image based backup and it worked perfectly.

I also use cloud based backups as well. If something happened to the local copy I would at least be able to get data back from the offsite backup.

 

[Carson Dyle]

I use it on two of my systems and have set it up for many people.

Can you find anything in the settings that will force it to do full backups periodically, say monthly? It's ridiculous to have a single backup set that spans almost eight months. Even if I wanted to manually delete old backups I couldn't do so.

 

[gmaster456]

Don't use it to back up over a network but I do use an external drive. Haven't needed to restore anything so I have no idea how it works.

 

[Kaido]

For Windows? My strategy is Genie Timeline (Time Machine-ish) + Macrium Reflect (full & incremental disk images) + Backblaze (cloud backup). All automatic.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Does Macrium Reflect really cost $70 now?