What good is an image backup if all I want is my data?
Hi everyone, Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. Here's the question.
"Having read your answer about what backup to use, I still don't get one thing.
If am backing up a hard drive using
a drive image backup program, but then switch computers,
say an upgrade to Windows 7, and then want to restore my data
to the new computer, an image won't work correct?
What program works on backing up just
my data so I can have it available at my new computer?"
Actually, you're not quite correct.
An image backup taken by most image backup
software will actually allow you to extract just your data.
I've been known to rely on exactly that myself.
It just won't work to restore everything else to your new machine.
So let's be clear.
An image, by definition, is an image backup of everything on your machine.
Every file, every folder, be it Windows,
be it programs, be it your data, be it the partition layout of your
machine, be it the boot information on your machine, it's all in there.
It is the best way to ensure
that you haven't forgotten something that you haven't overlooked,
something to back up when you think of backing up just your data.
Because what is just my data really mean anyway?
Well, you may have a good picture of it.
I have seen too many times where people
back up just their data and realize that didn't back up quite enough,
that there was something they wish they had included in that definition.
Hence my harping on using image backups,
because by definition, you don't have to think everything is in the image backup.
Now the trick, if you want to call it
that, is that image backups are way more flexible than you think.
Yeah, you're right.
Ideally, you restore an entire image to your machine in the case of, say,
malware or replacement hard drive or something like that.
And as I've discussed in other articles
and other videos, using an image to move to a new machine isn't the right thing.
It's not the thing to do.
The image is configured for the machine it
came from, and it can have troubles going to new hardware due to different hardware.
But you can still use it.
Remember, it's still got everything.
So the idea here is that once you've set up your new machine,
maybe after you've installed and set up Windows, after you've installed
the applications you care about, what you can do is using the backup
software that you used to create the image, Mount it, Mount the image.
In most cases, that's the approach that's taken.
What that does is it makes the entire contents of the image appear as if it were
another drive on your machine, and then you can go to town.
Then you can go ahead and find the files that you want to copy back all of your
data directly from the image to your machine.
You don't have to restore the image.
You can't just copy files.
Now there is one other trick.
Let's say you're using some backup
software that doesn't have this mounting ability.
The only thing you can do with an image
using whatever software this might be is restore it to a drive.
Great.
Restore it to a drive, just not your primary drive.
Restore it to an external drive or some other drive that you have available.
Then after it's been restored, it's not your system drive anymore, right?
Because we didn't restore it to the primary drive.
It's just a drive full of data.
A drive full of all the data that was
on your old machine that you can simply copy off.
So there are lots of ways to go about this.
I really do strongly recommend image backups simply because, like I said,
you don't have to think all you need to do is back up everything.
And then later when the time comes, you can pick and choose whether you need
everything or just some of the data files that happen to be there as well.
Hope that's helpful for Updates For related links, for comments and more,
visit askleo.com/4182, I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Ask Leo.com.
Thanks for watching.