Troubles don’t come with advance notice, and you can face it anywhere anytime. This is at least true for electronic machines including computers. Even though modern computers are reliable electronic devices, they can crash any time without any prior notice. And the worst thing which can happen after a computer crash is the corruption of data and hard drive. A single corrupted file or folder wouldn’t make much difference, but if your hard drive crashes you surely will be in trouble. Want to avoid this nightmare? Running Windows 10 powered machine? Learn from our mistakes and create a system image backup in Windows 10. How to do it? Follow this tutorial to know the steps. It’s been few months since Windows 10 is here and it has been working perfectly fine with my old Dell Inspiron laptop. Windows 10 is robust operating system and if you are still skeptical about the performance, believe me, you will not regret upgrading. Nevertheless, as always Microsoft’s new OS comes with new features and some old tricks as well. And one that very old school feature of Windows OS would allow you to create a system image backup in Windows 10. As I said earlier, if your system crashes, all the data in your computer’s hard drive will be permanently gone although you can try to recover them from your hard drive. However, a smart thing here you can do is be prepared for the disaster in advance and save the operating system exactly with all the settings and programs installed on it. This can be done by creating a system image backup of Windows 10 in advance. This isn’t a new feature and got carried forward from Windows 7 to Windows 8 and now to Windows 10. What is Windows System Image Backup? The Windows System Image Backup is a feature in Windows 10 that allows you to create a backup image of Windows in its current state. Later you can use the same system image to restore Windows 10 or to repair your PC. At times, your PC will refuse to boot because of malfunction and the best thing to repair your PC would be the Windows system image backup disk. This would also allow you to install the Windows 10 on any other PC without having to download the ISO from the beginning. However, before you proceed with creating a Windows system image backup, you should know that in the process you won’t be able to select what you backup and what you don’t. The Windows system image backup would backup everything on your PC in its current state. Create a System Image Backup Image in Windows 10 Pre-Requisites: An external Hard Drive or USB Flash Drive with enough free space for your Backup. If you don’t want to keep the Windows System image backup with other files on your hard drive, then use 64GB or 128GB flash drive. If not, use an external hard drive with enough storage space available. Your PC connected to the power source. Step 1: Connect your Hard Drive to PC If you are using a new flash drive, make sure to format it using the supported format. Connect your external hard drive or flash drive to the PC. Make sure that the hard drive has been successfully connected and detected by the system. Step 2: Create a System backup image Now there are two ways to start the System image creation process. Click on Start button and select Settings. Next, click on Windows and Update (Windows update, recovery backup). Now click on the Backup tab (from the left) and then click on “Go to Backup and Restore (Windows 7 / 8)”. This will open Windows 7 backup and restore section in a new window. Click on “Create a system image” from the left side. Alternatively, you can also open this directly from Control panel. Open Control panel, click on System and Security option and select Backup and Restore (Windows 7) from the list of options. From here, click on “Create a System image” option. Step 3: Start Creating System Image Backup Once you click on “Create a System image”, you will see, a message saying, “looking for a backup device”. Basically, the system is scanning for your connected external hard drive or flash drive. From the “Where do you want to save the backup?” section, click on On a Hard Drive and choose the hard drive you connected to your PC. Once selected, click on Next to proceed. Now you will be asked to select any other drive on your PC, of which you want to take the backup, select the drive if you have any. Now you will see a confirm your backup settings window. Once again confirm your backup location and make sure that you have selected the correct drive. On the confirmation page, you can also see the size of your backup right below the hard drive you have selected. Click on Start backup button at the bottom to begin the Windows system image backup process. The backup process may take a few minutes to few hours depending on the size of your backup and performance of your PC. Once the Windows system backup image has been created, you can use the same system image to restore or repair your computer. Restore Windows 10 with Windows 10 System Backup image Now if you ever want to restore the computer from the backup, then these steps will show you how to do it. Begin with connecting your hard drive with system backup image to your PC. Connect your Windows installation media to PC and reboot the PC. Once you are in the Windows setup section, click on Next and then select Repair your computer (bottom left corner). Next, click on Troubleshoot and select Advanced options. Select System Image Recovery and select the OS you want to restore from the Backup image. Click on Next button and at last click on Finish to restore the backup.
