Have just been coming up with a new backup strategy for my Windows systems, as previously i would use the Windows System Image tool very occasionally, however this is quite clunky, and i have heard it doesn't always do the best job of restoring a system.
Installed Aomei to try out, seems alright, however i really don't quite understand what i am doing, would like some guidance.
My Objective: Backup everything on my drive to an image (NOT a clone, since i want to be able to store images of multiple systems on my large external USB HDD, and i want to use Aomei's incremental backups.), including everything needed for Windows to boot. The idea being if my drive fails, all i have to do is buy a new one, image it from the backup, and boot right back into my OS again. No hassle of setting up a fresh installation, installing new programs, etc.
What I have tried: My laptop has 1 SSD, with 4 partitions. The EFI System Partition, the Windows partition (C:), and two recovery partitions. As seen here:
I thought that if I backed up the Windows partition and the EFI system partition, i would be good to go in terms of restoring to a new drive, and booting up. As I understand, the two recovery partitions are irrelevant in this situation?Within Aomei, I selected the 'Partition Backup' option, and then selected the EFI & Windows partitions. At this point, Aomei asked me if i wanted to use the 'System Backup' option, to preserve everything needed to boot - i declined, thinking i could achieve the same thing 'manually' with a Partition Backup, with finer control - For example, on my server PC, i want to exclude a particular partition from the backup.
After creating the backup, i restored it to an empty external HDD to test. First, i restored the EFI partition to the drive, with Aomei. I noticed once this completed, the partition was not marked as 'EFI System Partition' though. I followed the steps here to mark it as an EFI partition with Diskpart. I then restored the 'Windows' partition too. However, when i tried to boot my laptop from this HDD, imaged with the backup, i got the following error:
Interestingly, re-attaching the USB HDD i was trying to boot from to my system (Running from my original SSD), the HDD now looks like this:
The 260MB partition is no longer marked as an EFI partition, despite my efforts with Diskpart. Could this be the issue?
Sorry about the long post, would really appreciate some guidance: I don't quite understand how EFI partitions work and what i actually need to backup to be able to restore fully...
EDIT:Thanks all for the information. I have done an Aomei 'Disk Backup' to backup my entire SSD, and then restored this to an old HDD to try out. It did boot up, and the system (mostly) worked OK. (Although this procedure removed the 'Windows Boot Manager' entry from my UEFI when i tried to boot into my SSD again, which was a pain. No idea why this happened?)
One thing to note is that on the HDD i restored to, the two recovery partitions were not marked as recovery partitions, but were rather blank, as seen here:
Not sure if this could cause trouble? (I am not too worried about recovery partitions though, because i am backing up my whole system...)
Although the information regarding DISM is helpful, i am not so focused on a 'native' way to image Windows, a 3rd party tool is in some ways better for me (I.E can image a running system).