What size external hard drive for disk image?

lipsthefish

Hi all you lovely techies

Hubby has a windows 7 pc, not had it long and we are thinking that making a disk image might be a good idea as I have read it on here a few times. We have a 80 gb packard bell external drive at the moment but it is stuffed with around 8 years worth of junk! We are just wanting a blank drive solely for the disk image, we will be putting nothing else on there, we just don't know what size is the minimum. Any help appreciated.

mart44

The disk image size of my system is 45.5GB. The size of the image does depend on what you have installed on the system but I think any drive above a few hundred Gigabytes would be large enough, even for storing a number of images. No need to reserve it just for disk images though. Other files can be stored on it too.

fwor

There's no simple, correct answer to this, because it depends on what options you want if/when you need to restore.

One approach (which I use) is to use a disk that is exactly the same size as the disk on the PC - or larger. The disadvantage is that it's more costly, because you aren't compressing the data. The advantage is that you can literally boot the PC from the backup drive - almost no downtime. I can live with the cost aspect, because hard disk drives are cheap (or at least were until last month).

The cheaper approach is to create a compressed image on the backup drive. Cheaper, but if the main HDD fails you will need a replacement before you're up and running again. It's also not possible to predict how much disc space you will need, because some things (e.g. text files, RAW images) are very compressible, while others (e.g. JPEG images, MPEG movies) are not.

As a matter of interest, have you investigated the backup and restore options built into Win7? I'm told that they are extremely flexible, and very much better than the simpler tools in Windows pre-Vista.

muddyl

External drives are so cheap now id rather get a larger drive and use it for other stuff too. 250 gig for under £40. Or if you have an old pc or laptop thats no longer used, take the drive out and put into a case for external use. Cheap and environmentally friendly.

lipsthefish

I've not really looked into any backup options yet I am just an avid reader of the techie forum and have seen it mentioned a lot of times. The hard drive in the pc is 1.5tb. Hubby uses it for basic things so there are not a lot of programmes installed. Also, if we do the image and then install some new stuff would we be able to update the image? Sorry for being really thick!

fwor

The options for backing up are as complex as you want to make them.

An image is a very inflexible backup method, as it is really only a snapshot of the complete system at a given point in time. If you use compression and have a large backup drive you will probably get several images onto it.

A better approach is probably to start with a single image of the drive shortly after you get the PC and have all applications installed, and then use the built-in Windows backup tool to take one initial backup of your user data only, and then take incremental backups of just that on a regular basis. This is very space-efficient, though a restore is more time-consuming.

muddyl

lipsthefish wrote: »

if we do the image and then install some new stuff would we be able to update the image? Sorry for being really thick!

You wouldn't update the image. You'd make a new one. You could then keep the original as back up, or delete it to free up space.

mttylad

WHat about getting a USB external drive, perhaps a lot larger than the PC drive, so it can also be used for storing further files and backups?

closed

it depends on how much of that 1.5TB you've used, right click and see, and also if you wish to backup a recovery/diag partition.

You could always backup to dvd

Don't forget to create the boot disc too.

jayme1

muddyl wrote: »

External drives are so cheap now id rather get a larger drive and use it for other stuff too. 250 gig for under £40. Or if you have an old pc or laptop thats no longer used, take the drive out and put into a case for external use. Cheap and environmentally friendly.

a couple of weeks ago you could get a 1TB drive for £40-£50, but the tragic flooding in Thailand have forced all the HDD factories to close, now you would be lucky to find a 1TB drive for under £90.

point I'm making is right now it is a bad time to buy a hard drive as all the prices have sky-rocketed and you will be paying two times over the odds, your best bet is (if you don't need it right this second) to wait until the prices come back down when normal HDD production resumes.

also (to OP) when I clean installed windows 7 it took up ~12GB when I did the system image it all fitted onto one 4.7GB DVD, so if you haven't used much hard drive you could make a system image onto DVDs then using an external HDD use the backup option to automatically backup all your files.
then if you needed to reinstall windows you would use the system image on the DVDs and then use the backup restore to restore your files.

spud17

jayme1 wrote: »

a couple of weeks ago you could get a 1TB drive for £40-£50, but the tragic flooding in Thailand have forced all the HDD factories to close, now you would be lucky to find a 1TB drive for under £90.

Probably £120/£140. My 500GB Samsung £32 in June, £50 a week ago, now £100.