Windows 10: Backup and Restore - Exclude drive from system image backup

Hello,


I have a quick question about "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)" feature on Windows 10.

I set up a backup months ago to include a system image and some personal data and everything worked fine.


I notice this backup feature tried to backup my game dedicated drive (another drive, no system installation, only dedicated for game installation) as a system image and backups no more work.





What makes Windows think this drive is a system drive to include in my backup? How can I configure it to not backup this drive?

Thanks for your help. If you need any more details, feel free to ask.

:)

 

Free hard drive backup/restore program?

I am looking for a free (freeware) program that will back up and restore a hard drive. I'm looking to clone a few external hard drives. If the program will backup the used space instead of the whole drive this will be awesome! Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Is My Understanding of Windows Bare Metal System / Images Backups vs. File Backups ... and Restores Correct?

So my understanding of it is like this, there are two types of backups, and they are Image Backups and Data / User File backups...

• Image Backups (System Backups / System State /Disaster Recovery Backups)
  • The Creation Process
    • Can be created with wbadim system state backup
      
    • Then if the Data / User File Backups are included in it, they can be removed by mounting the Image Backup, and removing the Data / User Files from it to save on space (see
      this)
  • What it Includes / Excludes
    • Excludes the Data / User File Back
    • Includes installed programs and OS system files.
    • On Windows, you'll probably also want to remove any temp files from the image such as:
      • pagefile.sys
      • hiberfil.sys
      • swapfile.sys
  • When?
    • It's best to make this after you have the machine setup the way that you want with the programs already installed on it, and after updates are installed, you'll want to back it up again...this isn't always possible, but it's likely the best time to do this.
• Data / User File Backups (User File Backups)
  • The Creation Process
    • Usually a full backup is created and then incrementals or differentials after that (and of course use a strategy like GFS)
  • When?
    • Run more frequently than image backups, these backups are scheduled and run when few people are using the system...
  • What it Includes / Excludes
    • Only includes the data /user files, and it does not include any of the system files and program files like the Image Backup.

Then when you need to do disaster recovery, you restore the Image Backup first, and then when it's been recovered you add back in the
Data / User File Backups to the system.

I know that the Data / User File Backups (User File Backups)
can be removed from the xvhd file back created in the system state backup to decrease it's size by mounting it and deleting said files. But I'd like to know if I first restore the
Image Backups (System Backups / System State /Disaster Recovery Backups), and then restore my Data / User File Backups will I still be able to use the machine as it was when I did the backups?

Is my understanding of this correct? Is there anything I missed?

Thank you,

Andrew J. Leer

 

Backup utility

Cobian backup will do file backups locally or to ftp, with or without encryption and compression. However it doesn't do image backups, which is really what you need if want to fully restore your system.

I've used the W7 back up program and Acronis a few times to restore a system and both work great. With Acronis though, you need to burn the recovery cd they suggest FOR EACH and EVERY machine you use it on.

One problem with W7 backup is that seems to break easily. On one machine I did an upgrade re-install and the backup utility doesn't work. No luck in trouble shooting it either. So I now rely on Acronis exclusively for image backups. But I use Cobian for file backups to ftp.