download windows 7 disc or usb image iso How-To Create A Windows 7 System Image. Are you ready to say goodbye to 3rd party back-up applications? Windows 7 makes this possible with its excellent back-up and System Image features built into all versions of Windows 7. For me, I love a clean install of Windows. Not coincidentally, right after a fresh install is the best time to make a system image – because creating a system image is just like taking a snapshot of the entire drive. Creating a System Image will save everything on the drives you select, and then compress them into an image file which is good news since this means less space for backups! At a later time, if you want to return the computer to its original condition (when you bought or built it,) you can just load up the image and presto! No more “reformat the computer” ritual and no more worry about losing your entire system to a computer crash. Sounds great right? How do you do it? Important. Before starting this How-To Tutorial, please confirm the backup drive where you will save the image is formatted using NTFS. For more information on this reminder, please see the bottom of this how-to tutorial where I review How To format your backup drive and configure it with the NTFS file system. How To Create A System Image In Windows 7. 1. Click the Start Menu , then at the top of the menu Click Getting Started , then on the side Click Backup your Files . Note: You can also just type BackUp, and Windows 7 Search should find the application. 2. In the Control Panel window that appears, Click the blue Create a system image link. 3. The Create a system image window should pop-up. Select which hard disk, DVD, or network location where you are going to save your system image. Click Next to continue. 4. On the next page, we’ll keep with the basics; but for now, Check both your System and System Reserved drives. Once you have selected the drives Click Next to continue. Note: You can select as many drives as you want, but the more you choose to include means the larger the image size will be. 5. The next window is just a review, so make sure everything is correct then Click Start backup to start the process. This process can take several minutes, so patience is required. 6. After the backup completes, you are presented with the option to create a system repair disc . This option is a good idea just in case your system has any problems in the future. Click Yes . 7. Choose which Disc Recording drive you’ll be using to burn the disc. Insert a blank CD or DVD to the physical drive and then Click Create disc. Conclusion. Now you’re covered if your computer crashes, or if you want a clean slate and the option to be able to return to the way your computer currently is. When that time comes, be sure to read this Tutorial – How-To Restore from a Windows 7 System Image backup. Important Update – 1/24/2011. Looking through the comments, some readers have been running into issues during the backup/image process. While creating the system image and saving the data to the backup drive/external hard drive, the process aborts and Windows reports the backup drive has run out of disk space even though the drive appears to be almost empty. One of our readers pointed out the common reason for this failure is probably because the drive was formatted using a FAT or FAT-32 file system. A FAT-32 file system is limited in that it will not support files larger than 4 Gigabytes. So, even if the drive is 500 Gigs with several hundred gigs of free space available, you likely will not be able to save a system image to it since your system image file will probably be larger than 4 Gigs. The NTFS file system does not have this limitation, so my recommendation is to format the backup drive before hand and use the NTFS file system before storing any data on the drive or completing the How-To Tutorial above. How to Format a backup drive using the NTFS File System. Note: Formatting your backup drive will remove all data from it. If the drive has any data you need, save it somewhere else before you format it. Open Windows Explorer and Right-Click the External/Backup hard drive where you will store the Windows 7 System Image. From the context menu, Click Format . Click the File System Down Arrow and Select NTFS then Click Start . The drive should now be formatted, and you should be good-to-go. Now granted, it is also possible to convert a FAT-32 drive to NTFS. However, it’s possible you could have a bit of data corruption, so my recommendation is just to keep things clean, and reformat the backup drive as NTFS. 75 Comments. Great post. I haven't used the win 7 imaging utility yet so this was informative. Have you compared it to Ghost or the Acronis product? I'd be interested in learning how it compares. Main question is does the MS imager gracefully recover and restore the entire drive if the drive fails completely and you have to install a new drive (bare metal recovery)? How sad it is to be excited about being able to erase everything and starting over. Windows IS the virus. I'm not a Windows basher. I've used windows since 3.1. I switched to Linux in 2006 and have enjoyed every wonderful virus free, License free upgrade since. Sure I sacrifice a few windows apps that I can't get to run, but…It's a small price to pay. As far as eye candy…Google ubuntu compiz-fusion and watch the fun. I work in an environment with Windows all around me and I am fine. I'm not a “Blogger”, I write very few comments anywhere on the net. I couldn't help but express my feeling after ready the post. That version of Ubuntu looks awesome! I’ve seen it before, but never played around with it. Maybe i’ll do that one of these days!! I've not used the Acronis product but I've been using GHOST for 10 years now. Ghost is great and I actually still use it for imaging systems over the network etc.. but for home users I don't think you can beat the simplicity of the new Windows 7 backup tools. A few nice things is yes, you can restore bare metal systems (article almost done) but you can also image live systems since they are using shadow copy to copy the files into the image. Pretty slick stuff and once I get time over the next few days I'll be posting a few more articles on the subject. BTW – Welcome to the site! The Windows 7 “Backup” process was a bit confusing so I opted to follow this guide and did the system image. Everything but an excel file I had open was backed up without issues. The “image” size was 44gigs however my drive is only 50gigs so the compression they use (if any) is not very good. I'm going to guess they don't use compression because the ending file is a .vhd file. This is good and bad. Good because I can probably mount it and pull what I want at a later time. Bad bacause the compression is probably lame. For now, I'm going to keep my good ole GHOST handy for my monthly images. :) And yeah, if your system dies, you can use the Windows 7 system image to fully restore fram bare metal. Hey – I am awaiting the arrival of a new Win 7 box tonight. Should I install all my Apps (Office etc.) first, then do the image? Many thanks in advance, Cindy. @Cindy – Probably not a bad idea. I would also fully patch the box as well with Microsoft updates and get everything else current. Thankyou MrGroove – just unboxed a new HP Envy 15, so shall do as you suggest. I assume it would be better to do the image to a spare HDD rather than our NAS? Cin. Yup, it’s best to create backups on a different HDD incase the one you are operating on goes haywire. Hi Cindy, Great to hear you have a new computer on the way! With “when” to createa system image, it comes down to personal preference. If there are certain programs on your computer that you know you will ALWAYS use, then it can be handy to not worry about reinstalling them if you ever want to revert back to a clean slate. You’ll have to consider how often you’ll want to restore the image. You can also create multiple images, but this can quickly take up a lot of space. For me, the first thing I do after installing Windows 7 is Windows Update, followed by installing Microsoft Security Essentials. Then immediately after those two I create the system image. Why? I would opt to install Office and other programs, except that newer versions of those software are about to be released (Office 2010). I like to start with a clean slate everytime I revert back to the image without worrying about uninstalling the old software (which could possibly leave stray files and registry keys floating around).