I am new on Windows 8 and just got a new laptop with windows 8 installed to replace my aging windows xp machine. It does not come with any CD at all. I am thinking to create a fresh system image and store it in unraid server. Any suggestion what the easiest way to do it?

 

I think I read somewhere that there is free software that can be installed in a thumb drive/cd. It can create image in network storage (in this case would be unraid). In case hard drive in my laptop fails, I just need to replace the hard drive, plug back the thumb drive/cd  and run the recovery process from the software to retrieve and copy the image back.

 

Other thing: does the image size have to be as large as the size of hard drive in the laptop or whatever occupied it now?

 

Thank You!

BW

 

If W8 is like W7 then it has a built-in utility to create an image on a network share. There will be some way to create your own restore disk too that you'll have to do.

There is usually a partition that has the full image on the hard disk. There should be a utility that will allow you to burn a backup set. Something like create system restore disk.

As the ast poster said, you should be able to backup the system, including programs and user added stuff as a backup image, but you will still need a disk to boot from, in order to restore in any case.

 

 

Okay, I think I need to learn more about W8 itself if there is utility built in to do system restore.

Thank You!

http://clonezilla.org/

http://www.partimage.org/

http://partedmagic.com

Try Control Panel \ Backup and Restore

Try Control Panel \ Backup and Restore

 

Hopefully they've overhauled it and come to the current times, but I believe most of the windows backup software always required you to load a fresh OS again THEN restore the data.  A very unnecessary step which is why many use "offline" (i.e. OS not booted or software running on that drive) utilities to backup the disk quickly with more efficient restores.

I looked at Win 8 backup/restore option and don't like it. I am trying this instead [ftp=ftp://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/]http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/[/ftp] . It lets me save the backup file in the server and give me option to create either cd or tumb drive copy for boot up in case system is failing.

Anyone using it before?

 

BW

I'm personally a true believer of True Image.

I've used it on all my systems and I've had pretty good luck backing up and restoring without any hitches.

Clonezilla works well as well, but in my experience if you clone a larger drive and decide to swap it out for a smaller drive say a SSD drive it simply will not allow you to even if there is nothing taking up space. Well at least that is what my experience has been in the past.

I'm personally a true believer of True Image.

I've used it on all my systems and I've had pretty good luck backing up and restoring without any hitches.

Clonezilla works well as well, but in my experience if you clone a larger drive and decide to swap it out for a smaller drive say a SSD drive it simply will not allow you to even if there is nothing taking up space. Well at least that is what my experience has been in the past.

 

Very easy fix with parted magic.  It can resize partitions with data, moving existing data around.  I've used it multiple times.

 

Obviously if you have more data on the old drive than the new drive has space, that's a whole other issue...