Backup your system partition with Active@ Disk Image

Introduction

Creating system backups has been considered either too expensive or burdensome for decades. Few advanced users have indulged in such activities for personal use, while backups have been chiefly done within the business sector.

Things have not changed much since then, although there is every reason for users to take serious note of their data. HDD and SSD prices are at their historic lows, where the price for one gigabyte of storage is as low as $0.01! Conveniently, the prices of backup software have never been more affordable as well. A virus or any other seemingly negligible instability can force a user to reinstall his Windows OS without any possibility of recovering their data and months or even years of work. Why risk it when there are so many options to avoid such scenarios?

For this introduction to data backup, we will be using Active@ Disk Image, which can be installed for free using this link.

Choosing types of backups

Active@ Disk Image contains a plethora of features regarding data backup. However, in this case, we will use the Disk to Image option since it best suits our needs – backing up system partition.

When making a backup you can select from three options:

• Full backup – make a complete self-sufficient backup containing all the necessary data
• Incremental backup – based on a full backup, it contains only the changes since the base or full backup was created or later incremental backups have been created
• Differential backup only contains the image of a full backup and the overall changes created since the full backup creation.

Regardless of whether one goes for Incremental or Differential backup, first and foremost, it is required to perform Full backup, which is what we will do.

Next, we must choose the partitions we want to back up. Apart from the primary partition C: make sure to select two partitions that are reserved by the system.

For the backup to take place, choosing a destination with enough space to contain all the data we intend to back up is necessary.

Active@ Disk Image provides an option to compress and encrypt data. As discussed in our previous articles, compression and encryption do not considerably affect the backup process length. Therefore, it is advisable to use at least compression since it will decrease the storage required for the backup.

In the next window, review and confirm the changes you have made if everything is in order.

Performing Disk to Image Backup

The backup process will commence, and depending on the size of your partitions, speed of your drives, and CPU, your mileage may vary.

Once the whole backing up process is finished, Disk Image will verify the backup process's validity.

The process of backing up and verifying 204 GB of data took less than twenty-one minutes! Thanks to the compression, we saved 30 GB of storage!